Chapter 1. Japanese syntax and structure
Table of Contents
Syntax is what makes up the written language. English is made up of words written in roman script with spacing and interpunction, Japanese is slightly more complex, using three scripts: one that is used primarily for semantics and two that are used primarily for auxiliary writing. Japanese also has interpunction, but it lacks spaces, which makes the need for semantic script quite apparent as will be explained in the section on kanji.
Before we look at syntax, let's first look at what is not Japanese syntax: rōmaji (sometimes spelled ro-maji, roomaji or romaji), or ローマ字 as it is spelled in Japanese, with ローマ meaning Rome, and 字 meaning character(s). The most important thing to realise is that rōmaji is not Japanese. It's a transliteration of an aspect of Japanese into a western writing system. While this sounds useful, because it means Japanese can thus be written in western letters, this is a false assumption, because of the fact that rōmaji only captures one aspect of the language per rōmaji scheme chosen.
We can distinguish two main types of rōmaji, namely the phonetic transliteration, and the syntactic transliteration schemes. The first tries to mimic what Japanese sounds like to the western ear, and the most well known of these schemes is the "Hepburn" scheme. The second tries to mimic the order that is found in the kana tables and the most faithful of these is the "kunrei" scheme.
If we look at the differences, they are rather striking:
| Japanese | その話は普通じゃないと思いますよ。 |
| pure sound script (kana) | そのはなしはふつうじゃないとおもいますよ。 |
| phonetic rōmaji | sono hanashi wa futsuu janai to omoimasu yo. |
| syntactic rōmaji | sono hanasi ha futuu zyanai to omoimasu yo. |
The first rōmaji scheme can only (to a degree) accurately reflect the pronunciation of Japanese, thus making it easy to read as the reader's brain can instantly turn the words into internally vocalised words. The second rōmaji can only (to a degree) accurately reflect what the kana is supposed to look like, but is hard to read because what is written and how it should be internally vocalised are two completely different things: both versions of rōmaji are pronounced the same as the original Japanese.
The question then becomes which scheme to use in what setting. When one wants to simply get the Japanese across, using a phonetic romanisation scheme is the best approach, as people will not have to exert effort to understand you; it's just like reading their own language, except the letters spell out Japanese words now. When, on the other hand, one wants to show syntactical correctness, such as in a learning setting, or when one doesn't know the language for which one is romanising, syntactic rōmaji should be used.
But there is a problem here - why use rōmaji to teach Japanese, when one can use Japanese script instead? Learning the kana is not something that will take months, if one will be studying Japanese anyway. It takes about a week to memorise hiragana to a level that continued practice (which is what someone who's studying will be doing anyway) and exposure to Japanese texts will perfect for you, even if you don't really try.
The question then becomes "who are these rōmaji schemes for?" The answer to this question is remarkably simple, actually. Phonetic romanisation, such as Hepburn and the like, are intended for non-Japanese people who understand the Roman alphabet. Different countries might have different schemes (for instance, the German 'j' is pronounced the same as the English 'y', so the romanisation 'ja' might mean something different in Germany than it does in English speaking countries), but the idea is that the phonetic scheme lets non-Japanese readers understand written "Japanese" easily without having to know how to read real Japanese to make sense of it. The syntactic scheme is actually intended for Japanese who need to write their Japanese in western letters, such as in international material, without having to actually be intimately familiar with which western language in particular they are romanising for.
The third category of people that might need rōmaji, people who want to learn Japanese, don't actually need rōmaji at all. Ideally, students should never be exposed to rōmaji at all in their educational material, save when the pronunciation for the kana is explained. However, when it is used, it should be remembered that students will understand that Japanese written in western letters does not accurately reflect the way it is written in Japanese. In this setting it makes most sense to use a rōmaji that's easy on the eyes rather than being an artificial alphabet that isn't read the way it is written.
That said, these pages will contain some phonetic rōmaji in the outline of Japanese, but will not use rōmaji in the sections concerned with actually teaching the language in terms of grammar, construction and phrases.
Japanese has three scripts - kanji, hiragana and katakana. Kanji is used for semantics, while hiragana and katakana are sound scripts, used to indicate verb inflections, particles and simple words for which kanji are not required, or suitable.
The kana are two writing systems both denoting the same thing - a set of 46 individual syllables that can be arranged in a table called the gojuuon, 五十音, meaning "the 50 sounds" after the classical table that contained 50 sounds. The following table of Japanese syllabaries is necessarily in western letters, because the alternative is to place consonants above the columns, and vowels on the rows, and writing the intersections in Japanese. This approach makes people think that there are such sounds as "tu" or "si", which in fact do not exist.
| n/m/ng | wa | ra | ya | ma | ha | na | ta | sa | ka | a |
| ri | mi | hi | ni | chi | shi | ki | i | |||
| ru | yu | mu | hu/fu | nu | tsu | su | ku | u | ||
| re | me | he | ne | te | se | ke | e | |||
| (w)o | ro | yo | mo | ho | no | to | so | ko | o |
| ん | わ | ら | や | ま | は | な | た | さ | か | あ |
| り | み | ひ | に | ち | し | き | い | |||
| る | ゆ | む | ふ | ぬ | つ | す | く | う | ||
| れ | め | へ | ね | て | せ | け | え | |||
| を | ろ | よ | も | ほ | の | と | そ | こ | お |
| ン | ワ | ラ | ヤ | マ | ハ | ナ | タ | サ | カ | ア |
| リ | ミ | ヒ | ニ | チ | シ | キ | イ | |||
| ル | ユ | ム | フ | ヌ | ツ | ス | ク | ウ | ||
| レ | メ | ヘ | ネ | テ | セ | ケ | エ | |||
| ヲ | ロ | ヨ | モ | ホ | ノ | ト | ソ | コ | オ |
These tables have a few things that may mislead people who see them the first time. Things to be aware of are that, while romanised with an r, the Japanese ら-column sounds are not actually an r, this is merely a romanisation convention. In reality, these sounds have a consonant that can be pronounced anywhere from a soft "r", to a normal "l" to a mix form of r/l/d. This makes hearing the consonant for people who are not familiar with it sometimes plain impossible, as their ears simply cannot distinguish it (yet) from for instance the real 'd' in Japanese.
Furthermore, the ふ / フ sound actually has a "consonant" that doesn't exist in many western languages. It's a sound produced using the diaphragm, something that in western language is typically reserved for breathing rather than speech. ひ/ヒ has a consonant not unlike the "ch" in the German word "ich", and the Japanese う sound can be anywhere between the Italian "u" and the German "u" (which are quite different). Finally, the ん/ン is a nasal sound that can be either an "n", an "m" or an "ng" depending on where it is located in a word: when preceding a わ-, ら-, や-, は-, な-, た-, だ-, さ- or あ-column syllable, the pronunciation is an "n". When preceding a ま-, ば- or ぱ-column syllable, the pronunciation is "m", and when preceding a か- or が-column syllable, the pronunciation is "ng". Finally, when a word ends on ん, the pronunciation can range from an "n" to a mix between "n" and "ng".
Voicing in Japanese kana is done using a diacritic called the dakuten, ゛, which is placed in the upper right area of the syllables:
| romanised voicing | voicing in hiragana | voicing in katakana | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Now, as the Japanese ministry of education determined that not enough people could distinguish between the ぢ and じ, and づ and ず syllables, they officially replaced the normal ぢ with じ and づ with ず. This can lead to some confusion in for instance voiced kanji - kanji whose pronunciation changes when they're used in compounds, such as 片付く, which is kata + tsuku, but turns into katadzuku when combined into one word (more on this in the kanji section).
Finally, the secondary voicing to turn "h" into "p" is done using a diacritic called the handakuten, ゜, which is also placed in the upper right area of the syllables: ぱ, ぴ, ぷ, ぺ, ぽ for hiragana and パ, ピ, プ, ペ, ポ for katakana.
While this covers the basic sounds, it does not cover glide sounds. Things such as "nya" or "kyo" are not covered by single syllables, and are created using a combination of the い-row consonant sounds, paired with a half-size や, ゆ or よ for the glide sound. For instance, きや is "kiya", but きゃ is "kya".
Long vowel sounds differ for the two scripts. In katakana, a long vowel sound is marked using the ー symbol after a syllable to indicate its vowel sound is twice as long as usual. However, not all vowel sounds that you would expect to be a long vowel are considered long vowels in Japanese. For instance, the Japanese word for Spain, スペイン, is not written as スペーン because Japanese hear a distinct エ followed by an イ in the word "Spain".
For hiragana, the convention is to write an extra vowel syllable to create a long vowel. However, due to the nature of the Japanese writing system, there are a few ways in which you can add an extra vowel:
- A long あ is always written as an あ-row syllable + あ.
- A long い is always written as an い-row syllable + い.
- A long う is always written as a う-row syllable + う.
- A long え can be written as either え-row syllable + え or え-row syllable + い, depending on the word it's in, and the kanji for this word.
- A long お can be written as either お-row syllable + お or お-row syllable + う, depending on the word it's in, and the kanji for this word.
To elaborate on the え/お issue, while generally the convention is to lengthen an お sound to おう, and え sound to えい, there are a great number of words that have native readings that are fixed as え-row syllable + え or お-row syllable + お. Also, when two kanji are combined where one ends on an え-row syllable and the next starts with an え, or one ends on an お-row syllable and the next starts with an お, then the combination isn't suddenly changed to えい or おう. This is because compound readings aren't technically long vowels, but simply combined pronunciations.
1.2.5. The "Double consonant"s
This section is about the Japanese glottal stop. Typically called a "double consonant" in literature on Japanese, this name is a romanised invention, owing ot the fact that when writing out Japanese words that use this construction In romaji, we see a double consonant, such as in words like "kippu" meaning "ticket". Even in western languages, this is not technically a double consonant: we write it that way, but when we pronounce it we do not say one consonant two times, we do the same as the Japanese, namely use a glottal stop. Lacking actual consonants, Japanese has a simple way of denoting the glottal stop in speech, using a small つ or ツ. Thus, the word "kippu" is written as きっぷ, with the small っ before ぷ to "double its consonant".
However, な-column and ま-column syllables do not have a glottal stop preceding them. Instead, the ん / ン is used. So for instance "danna" meaning "master" is wrritten as だんな, not だっな.
1.2.6. Approximating non-Japanese sounds with katakana
To approximate sounds that aren't used in Japanese, a few additional rules allow the kana to be used to write out foreign words without having to use non-Japanese script. The following table shows how Japanese write out the English sounds for consonant/vowel combinations that have no (combination of) kana for it under the normal rules of using kana:
| a | i | u | e | o | |
| f | ファ | フィ | フェ | フォ | |
| v (1) | ヴァ | ヴィ | ヴ | ヴェ | ヴォ |
| v (2) | バ | ビ | ブ | ベ | ボ |
| w | ウィ | ウ | ウェ | ||
| ts | ツィ | ツェ | ツォ | ||
| ch | チェ | ||||
| sh | シェ | ||||
| j | ジェ | ||||
| t | ティ | トゥ | |||
| d | ディ | ドゥ |
As you can see, the approximation of the "v" sound has two possible transcriptions. The second is the officially preferred version, the first is the older way of approximating "v", which is still in use today, just less preferred.
Hiragana is primarily used to write out things for which there are no kanji, such as verb inflections, or writing out things for which there are kanji but which do not warrant kanji to be used, such as some simple words, or writing out names without kanji.
Katakana is used for two things. The main role of katakana is writing out foreign-derived words called gairaigo, 外来語, which have been integrated into the Japanese language (a common mistake is to think 外来語 are just words sounded out in Japanese. While this is true for some words because they are recently integrated words, it's not true for all. Consequentially, if a recent 外来語 doesn't sound like its equivalent in the language it came from, this is not a word that's been integrated "wrong", but a Japanese word).
Secondly, katakana is used to put emphasis on words, similar to the western use of italics, underlines or asterisks. While Japanese has separate emphasis marking for underlining (denoted by a line under text in horizontal writing, or on the right side of text in vertical writing) and syllable emphasis (denoted by dots over text in horizontal writing, or on the right side of text in vertical writing), using katakana places more emphasis than either of these, by virtue of being a different script altogether.
It should come as no surprise that the bulk of Japanese script is not actually Japanese, but Chinese in origin. Originally, Japanese was a spoken language without written form, and only after contact between the Japanese and Chinese were established, were the Japanese exposed to the concept of written record, leading to the borrowing of the Chinese writing system for recording spoken Japanese. The following section gives a brief explanation how this happened, and why the Chinese writing system is still being used.
The Japanese kanji that are in use today are merely a subset of a vast number of kanji that were in use up to less than a century ago. The history of kanji use in Japan can be traced back to the 6th century A.D., with three ages significantly influencing which kanji and which of their readings were brought back home to Japan from China.
6th century A.D.
The first contact between Japan and China was during the late 6th century A.D., when China was moving from decentralised rulership back to a central rulership under Sui Wen-ti, who heralded in the Sui dynasty. This period did not last long, starting at the reunion of the independent states in China around 586 A.D., and ending in 618 A.D., after Sui's son had depleted the country of its resources through a series of poor political and military decisions. The power struggle that followed led to the T'ang dynasty being established by one of Sui's generals, Li Yuan. This dynasty would last until the 10th century A.D.
Confusingly, the Japanese refer to readings that come from this time as 呉音 or Wu readings. However, the kingdom of Wu was in power from 29a.d. to 280 A.D., and ended well before the first real literary contact between Japan and China.
7-9th century A.D.
In the middle of the T'ang dynasty there was another exchange between Japan and China, this time with T'ang Chinese, which had been established as the main Chinese Dialect.
Confusingly again, the Japanese refer to readings that come from this period of exchange as 漢音 meaning Han readings, which is even more confusing as the Han dynasties (there were three) predate the Wu kingdom.
14th century A.D.
The 14th century A.D. saw the most famous of eras for China, the Ming dynasty. Founded by Yu-chang, the Ming dynasty saw the Mongols being driven out of China, and heavy trade with Europe. In this period, Japan and China had another linguistic exchange, from two fronts. Firstly, the merchants doing business with the Chinese brought back home readings that are referred to as 唐音, and secondly from Zen monks who went to study Zen Buddhism in China and brought back readings that are referred to as 宋音.
To complete the confusion, Japanese refer to 唐音 as T'ang readings, and to 宋音 as Sung readings. However, the T'ang dynasty ended in 906 A.D. being followed by the Sung dynasty, which ran from 960 A.D. to 1127 A.D., after which the north of China had to be abandoned to nomadic invaders, and continued from 1127 A.D. until 1279 A.D. in the south of China.
Because each of these three periods of exchange had a different Chinese dialect as dominant dialect, there may be many readings for the same kanji, as it would have still been in use (though possibly somewhat modified in form), with only the pronunciation having changed to suit the court that ruled at the time of the linguistic exchange.
Because Japanese was originally a spoken language and very different from Chinese, modern Japanese is a hybrid of classical Japanese and classical Chinese pronunciations expressed in Japanese phonemes. This is reflected in the names of the "readings" for kanji: readings that come from classical spoken Japanese are called kunyomi, 訓(くん)読(よ)み, and readings that come from classical Chinese are called onyomi, 音(おん)読(よ)み.
A problem with these readins is that it is not always clear when to use which reading. There are no rules that state that a kanji is read in a particular way when used on its own, or when part of a word. The only real way to make sure you are using the right reading for a kanji when encountered in a context that you had not seen it in before, is to look it up - while sometimes one can guess whether a kunyomi or onyomi is used, it is typically impossible to be certain.
1.5.3. Why kanji are a blessing rather than a curse
Initially, they weren't. Chinese was to the Japanese what Latin was to the Scholars of old in the west - an elite language that only the rich and important people used. However, modern times have seen reforms restricting the kanji used in Japanese from the plethora of the Chinese lexicon (over 35 thousand characters if you really count them all) down to about 7000, of which you only need to know between three and three and a half thousand to be truly literate, rather than just able to read most normal texts thrown at you. This restriction means that Japanese now has a reasonably small (compare 3000 characters to over 50,000 words for English - many of which you will know - and it's suddenly not that much any more) set of kanji that are used in every day written Japanese, and that the language has become more accessible to everyone, Japanese and non-Japanese alike.
There are two main reasons why kanji are a blessing, and they somewhat tie into each other. Because Japanese doesn't have any spacing, there are no clear word boundaries, and as a reader you have to find these boundaries yourself, using your best judgement. As verbal words in Japanese consist of a kanji plus some hiragana to indicate inflection (called okurigana, 送(おく)り仮名(がな)), and since nouns are typically in kanji and particles essentially always in hiragana, the presence of kanji in a sentence lets you find word boundaries a lot faster than if there were no kanji. The faster you can find word boundaries, the more time you can spend on translating the words, and the faster you can translate words, the faster you can understand what a sentence reads. This brings us to the second reasonon why kanji are a blessing: homophony. When we call a language homophone, we mean that a substantial set of the words in the it sound the same, while being written differently and meaning different things. If we pair the fact that Japanese is a homophone language with the fact that it lacks spaces, the problem this creates seems almost insurmountable: sentences of which you don't know where one word ends and another begins, and which could mean any number of things depending on what you think a certain combination of syllables should be translated as. As an example, let's take the sentence "I am going to Tokyo", which in romanised japanese would be written as watashihatoukyouheikimasu (using hiragana mimicking romanisation). If you are just glancing this sentence, it would be incredibly hard to tell what it reads, because both "wata" and "watashi" are words in Japanese, as are "hatou" and "toukyou", and while "he" is used only as particle in Japanese, "ikimasu" could be from two different verbs (namely "iku", to come, or "ikiru", to live). This would be an incredibly inefficient way of organising written language, and kanji truly are the key to understanding Japanese on paper. Using kanji is a bit like adding notes directly in a text. In our example sentence, writing it in kanji we suddenly get something that looks a bit like the following: watashi (the one meaning "I") ha toukyou (the city) he i("going")kimasu.
So using kanji improves the readability of a text in two dramatic ways; finding word boundaries has suddenly become relatively easy, thanks to the interplay between kanji and kana, and the ambiguity of words that might mean five or more different things (and Japanese is full of those!) is solved at the same time.
A nice additioanl blessing of kanji is a less obvious one: furigana, 振り仮名. While in most western languages you can play with which word you use to express yourself as a writer or a poet, in Japanese, writers can choose to use kanji "improperly" to convey their intention better. Because of the existence of furigana, a system to write supposed pronunciation above kanji in printed text, it is possible to maintain the pronunciation of the word one means to use, but adapt the kanji so that it expresses a much finer nuance than just the kanji or just the pronunciation for the intended word, or visa versa keep the kanji form of word but instead use a different pronunciation. Examples of these are for instance a phrase which uses the words "ano otoko", meaning "that man [over there]", but have it act as pronunciation for the kanji "yatsu", which is a derogatory term for someone. This way the writer can show that while the sentence "sounds" normal, there is a finer underlying motivation - a powerful tool for writers. Conversely, and this is a trick not infrequently used in manga for instance, is using the pronunciation "are" meaning "that thing [over there]" over very long words written in kanji only. The first time round the furigana will have the proper pronunciation, but a second time it simply reads "that", refering you back to the instance of the word that had the full, long, cumbersome furigana. This playing with words, inherent to the Japanese written form, is something that allows one to not just write what one is saying, or what one describes, but it allows writers to - when they want - write down the underlying thought at the same time, without footnotes or editorial; something that is impossible in almost every other language in the world.
1.5.4. Stroke orders, and why they matter
Kanji have very specific drawing orders for the strokes that make up the kanji. While this seems overly tedious, there is actually a logic behind this practice. Because of the existence of stroke order, kanji can actually be remembered in terms of compounds rather than individual strokes, because each compound corresponds to a single mental image. For instance, if one knows how to draw 糸, 又 and 土 (with only one way to draw each of these) then remembering how to draw 経 is a matter of remembering three components, rather than 11 individual strokes in an uncoordinated order. This pedagogical benefit is a direct consequence of the logical order that comes with drawing kanji. This order is actually "dictated" by a few general rules:
- Kanji composed of multiple components are written in a top-down, left to right component order.
- Strokes inside a component are typically written top-down, left to right. They may change direction, but only down or to the right.
- When there are intersections that make determining which stroke comes first hard, the following rules apply:
- For a vertical/horizontal intersection that does not protrude at the bottom such as in 玉, draw the top horizontal first, then the vertical, then the rest.
- For a vertical/horizontal intersection that does protrude at the bottom, such as in 牛 or 年, draw all horizontals first, and finally the vertical.
- For X crossed strokes such as in 文 or 父, the stroke that runs upper-right/lower-left is drawn first, then the other.
- Complete shape intersecting lines such as the vertical in 中 or the horizontal in 母 are written last.
- Box enclosures are written｜first, then followed up to 冂, then have their content drawn, and are then closed at the bottom.
- Semi enclosures such as in 込 or 建 are written last, after the semi-enclosed component.
There are a few exceptions to these rules (of course), so when learning kanji one should always have a reference book that teaches you how to draw kanji. A common book for this is Hadamitsky and Spahn's "Kanji and Kana", but my personal preference goes out to a santaijiten, 三体辞典, a specialised dictionary that shows how to write kanji in three styles: regular handwritten style, flowing handwriting (semi-cursive) and full cursive style. These three styles together are referred to as kaigyousho, 楷行草, as an abbreviated word for the three separate styles: kaisho, 楷書, print writing, gyousho, 行書, flowing writing (semi-cursive) and sousho, 草書, "grass" writing (cursive).
It should be noted that the rules given only apply to the print style, since semi-cursive and cursive connect up a lot of strokes so that the kanji can be drawn faster and in more of a flowing way than writing it stroke by stroke. As an indicator, most adult people's handwriting are somewhere between print style and flowing style.
"If you don't know how it's pronounced, why don't you look it up in the dictionary?" A much loved joke that in most western language will be funny because you obviously cannot look up a word if you don't know how it's pronounced, because you won't know how it's spelled. This is slightly different for kanji. Even if you don't know a kanji, there are still various ways to look it up and discover what its readings are.
Many kanji share common components. For instance, 坂, 軽 and 屋 all have 土 as part of them. There are 214 kanji like 土, that are both kanji by themselves, but can also be used to categorise other kanji that contain them in some form or other. These are called the 214 classical radicals or bushu, 部首, and have been used for ages in Chinese dictionaries for looking up kanji. However, because there can be minor (and sometimes major) drawing variations when a kanji is used as a radical, there are in fact about 400 graphemes that act as indexes for kanji.
Minor differences would for instance be 牛 (cow) turning into the left element in 物 (thing), with the only real difference being that the lower line is slanted instead of horizontal. More drastic changes are for instance 手 (hand) becoming the left element in 授 (instruct), where the top stroke is no longer used. The most drastic are the changes where a kanji is no longer readily recognisable from its radical counterpart. For instance, 犬 (dog) becomes the left component in 猫 (cat) when used as a radical. 艸 (grass) becomes the top component in 草 (weeds), and probably the most confusing of all the pair 邑 (small village) and 阜 (big village) turn into the 阝 shape on respectively the right and the left side of kanji, such as in 部 (section) and 降 (descend).
Unlike for western dictionaries, you need to learn a few things before you can use a kanji dictionary. Firstly, you need to get used to learning to see kanji as sets of smaller kanji, rather than as random bags of lines and strokes. This typically takes a bit before you've seen at least enough kanji to start recognising shapes. Secondly, you need to learn which parts of a kanji are a radical, and which aren't. This also takes a bit of time, but practice makes perfect.
1.5.6. Compound pronunciations
There is one downside to the way in which the Japanese use kanji, and that's the spontaneous and unpredictable way in which kanji pronunciations may be voiced in Japanese. For instance, if we take the kanji 片, pronounced 'kata', and 付ける, pronounced 'tsukeru', then combining them would yield katatsukeru. Except it doesn't; combining them voices the pronunciation of 付, to become 'dzu', and the whole word becomes katadzukeru.
This is strange. It's in fact so strange, that no one's been able to determine why this happens. There do not appear to be any rules for it, and when people do come up with rules, there tend to be as many exceptions as there are words that fall under them, so these 'rules' are relatively useless. It essentially means that you will have to remember which words are pronounced in which way, and always keep this in mind.
A second thing is that some pronunciations may contract. This is less problematic than the spontaneous voicing problem, as some rules can be given that are most of the time applicable, but again the best strategy is to just learn the word by pronunciation.
- If a kanji that ends on つ or ち is followed by a kanji beginning with a か-column, さ-column, た-column or ぱ-column syllable in the same word, typically the つ or ち is replaced with a っ to effect a double consonant.
- If a kanji that ends on く is followed by a kanji beginning with a か-column syllable in the same word, typically く is replaced with a っ to effect a double consonant.
Japanese can be written in two ways. The first is the more traditional way, writing vertically top to bottom, starting at the right of the page and working towards the left. This method is used when one writes anything by hand, and hasn't yet been completely killed off by the more western writing style of writing left to right by hand. Most novels, as well as dialogue in manga, are written in this way.
The more western style is to write horizontally left to right, starting at the top of the page and working towards the bottom. Regardless of which way one writes, sentences end with a Japanese period called a kuten, 句点, or maru (まる), written as "。". Japanese also has a comma, 読点, written "、". Quoting in Japanese is done differently depending on the writing style: in horizontal writing, regular quotes are enclosed by "「 " and " 」", but in vertical writing these quote marks are rotated clockwise 90 degrees, with a " ┐" shape opening the quote and a "└ " shape closing it. For names and booktitles and the likes, double quotes are used, "『 " for opening and " 』" for closing, and again rotated 90 degrees for vertical writing.
Finally, there are special symbols for repeated kanji and kana, of which in modern Japanese only the kanji repeater 々 (called a kurikaeshi, 繰り返し, meaning "repeat") is frequently used. The repeaters for hiragana are ゝ and ゞ, and the repeaters for katakana are ヽ and ヾ for unvoiced and voiced respectively, but due to the kana being relatively simple to write in contrast to many-stroke kanji, it is typically bad practice to use repeater symbols instead of repeating the kana.
The Japanese language has a few interesting particularities: there are no articles (the, a, an), there is no explicit future tense for verbs (the predicative form is both present tense as well as future tense), there are no noun plurals, except for a handful of classes of nouns, personal pronouns are avoided whenever possible, and once a topic is known to all people, it's generally no longer mentioned even if the conversation concerns it, which means most of the time sentences will simply lack a subject. This makes the language both very simple, and very complex, because it means that there are very few rules to learn to form proper grammatical constructions, but that great understanding is required before you can figure out the precise meaning. For this reason, many example sentences in this reader will have words or subphrases enclosed in square brackets, to indicate that they are meant to be in the intended translation, but are not actually mentioned explicitly anywhere in the example sentence.
Before we look at how we're supposed to make sense of sentences and discourse, it makes sense to look at the principal word classes that can be identified in Japanese so that we at least have a slight idea of what we can expect.
Unlike most western languages, Japanese has two types of verbal words. That is, words that can be inflected and conjugated. While in most western languages, the only verbal word class is (not surprisingly) verbs, in Japanese this includes both verbs, and verbal adjectives. Verbs in Japanese are categorised in three main verb classes, "godan", "ichidan" and irregular verbs, based on the way they inflect. Verbal adjectives are also called i-adjectives because of the property that all verbal adjectives end on い in their predicative form, differentiating them from the noun adjective which will be explained later on.
Verbs in modern Japanese are inflected using five different inflection bases or "katsuyoukei", 活用形, depending on the role of the verb. I say modern, because classical Japanese uses six, also using the shuushikei:
| mizenkei | 未然形 | The imperfect inflection base, used to indicate such things as negatives and potentials. |
| renyoukei | 連用形 | The conjunctional inflection base, used for conjoining sentences and words. |
| (shuushikei | 終止形 | The classical sentence ending inflection base. In modern Japanese, the 連体形 has replaced it.) |
| rentaikei | 連体形 | The predicative inflection base, used for ending predicates, sometimes called the dictionary form. |
| izenkei | 已然形 | The classical imperfect inflection base, used in modern Japanese for hypothetical |
| meireikei | 命令形 | The commanding inflection base, used for creating commands. |
Verbal adjectives also use these bases, except that adjectives lack a 命令形, as one cannot issue an adjectival command. The only way to issue a command in relation to an adjective, both in western and Japanese, is to issue the command "be [adjective]", relying on the verb "being" to make it work.
What follows are the particulars of how verbs inflect, as well as a list of important verbs that deserve some special attention before continuing with the linguistic aspects of the Japanese language.
2.1.1.1. Godan conjugating verbs - 五段活用動詞
Named rather aptly, 五段 literally means five-row. The name comes from the fact that in modern Japanese, the endings of the bases take on all five of the Japanese vowel sounds. Traditionally these verbs were called yodan, 四段 , meaning four-row, because the bases for these verbs end on the あ-, い-, う-, え- and え- sounds respectively, which are four sounds. However, with there also being an お sound from the pseudo-futurum construction (created using the 未然形), these verbs have been renamed to 五段 verbs.
While explaining how to construct the bases for 五段 verbs is actually slightly easier to do when using rōmaji, this would be somewhat like cheating since it's not required, provided you remember your gojuuon, 五十音, or Japanese syllabaries.
In their predicative form (commonly called dictionary form because that's the form that you will find it listed under), 五段 verbs can end on any syllable that is on the same row as the う syllable in the syllabary table. The bases for 五段 are constructed by replacing the last syllable with one from a different row, with the row being dependent on the following table:
| 未然形 | あ row syllable |
| 連用形 | い row syllable |
| 連体形 | う row syllable |
| 已然形 | え row syllable |
| 命令形 | え row syllable |
To give a few examples:
| "dictionary form" | 分かる (understand) | 引く (draw) | 読む (read) | 会う (meet) |
| 未然形 | 分から | 引か | 読ま | 会わ |
| 連用形 | 分かり | 引き | 読み | 会い |
| 連体形 | 分かる | 引く | 読む | 会う |
| 已然形 | 分かれ | 引け | 読め | 会え |
| 命令形 | 分かれ | 引け | 読め | 会え |
You may notice (at least I hope you did) that the 未然形 for あう, the last verb, is somewhat odd here. This isn't a typo, but a remnant of classical Japanese. Classically, verbs ending on う were actually ふ verbs, and they would be written -は, -ひ, -ふ, -へ and -へ, but pronounced -わ, -い, -う, -え and -え. With the linguistic reforms aimed at having words written more the way they were actually pronounced (such as 今日, which was written as けふ while being pronounced きょう), the way these bases were written was changed accordingly.
You may also have noticed that there are only four sounds, so where is the fifth? When placing a verb in the pseudo-futurum (a form used to express "let's...", "shall we..." and also "is...?") using the 未然形, the final あ sound is changed into おう:
| 連体形 | 分かる | 引く | 読む | 会う |
| pseudo-futurum | 分かろう | 引こう | 読もう | 会おう |
which completes the five vowel sounds.
These verbs are also referred to as "う-verbs", or "class I" verbs by many books and readers on Japanese. Since this reader tries to stick to Japanese as close as possible, we won't use those terms but will stick with the Japanese name instead.
2.1.1.2. Ichidan conjugating verbs - 一段活用動詞
While in modern Japanese there are only 一段 verbs, the name
doesn't make a lot of sense unless I tell you a little about classical Japanese. In classical Japanese, there are actually four
verb classes contrasting to 五段, namely the 上一段
verbs (upper single grade), the 下一段 verbs (lower single grade), the
上二段 verbs (upper two grades) and the
However, as time went on, and as there were a really small number of verbs in the 下一段, 上二段 and 下二段 categories, the conjugation system got simplified by the people and the classical verb forms have all been turned into either 五段 or (gradeless) 一段.
The bases for all four are the same in modern Japanese:
| 未然形 | remove る |
| 連用形 | remove る |
| 連体形 | keep る |
| 已然形 | replace る with れ |
| 命令形 | remove る |
There is sometimes some confusion about whether the 命令形 for 一段 verbs should be to remove る, or whether it should be replaced with ろ. This is usually a phrasing problem: 命令形 means two things in Japanese. On the one hand, it means the commanding inflectional base. This is a grammar term. On the other, in normal language the noun 命令形 refers to something "spoken in a commanding form". For the grammatical inflection basis, the form is the same as the 未然形 or 連用形. That is, drop the る. When an actual command is issued, the 命令形 inflectional basis can get either よ or ろ to form a real command. However, since ろ is used far more than よ, people sometimes mistakenly believe this is also the grammatical basis.
These verbs are also referred to as る-verbs, or class II verbs by many books and readers on Japanese. Some books also distinguish between class IIa and class IIb verbs, to reflect the difference between 上一段 and 下一段 (though, why they do this is a bit of a mystery).
2.1.1.3. Irregular conjugating verbs - 変格活用動詞
Japanese has a well-counted two irregular verbs, and of the two, one is actually irregular in a rather unexpected way. So let's do that one first.
kuru, 来る, is the verb used in Japanese to mean "to come", and if viewed in its kanji form seems to be a regular 一段 verb except for the 命令形. However, if we look at how the kanji is pronounced through its bases, we suddenly see it's doing wildly strange things, actually changing reading for the kanji, rather than for inflection kana:
| kanji form | pronunciation | |
| 未然形 | 来 | こ |
| 連用形 | 来 | き |
| 連体形 | 来る | くる |
| 已然形 | 来れ | くれ |
| 命令形 | 来い | こい |
As an added irregularity, unlike 一段 verbs the grammatical and everyday 命令形 are the same for this verb.
The second irregular verb is suru (する), "to do". This verb has no kanji form in modern Japanese, but it does have a few derivatives: zuru (ずる) and jiru (じる). ずる is just a voiced version of する, and じる is a more modern version of ずる (classical verbs ending in [う syllable] + る have mostly become modern verbs ending in [い syllable] + る instead). The bases for する, ずる and じる are:
| する | ずる | じる | |
| 未然形 | し, せ (さ) | じ, ぜ | じ |
| 連用形 | し | じ | じ |
| 連体形 | する | ずる | じる |
| 已然形 | すれ | ずれ | じれ |
| 命令形 | せ, し, せい | ぜ, ぜい | じ |
As a note, the 未然形 "さ" for する is only used for constructing the passive (される) and causative (させる) verb forms.
2.1.1.4. Verbal adjectives - 形容詞
The verbal adjective uses bases for inflections just like verbs, but the way they're constructed is a bit different from verbs. As mentioned, Japanese verbal adjectives end on an い, but it should be noted that this doesn't mean that adjectives that sound like they end on い are verbal adjectives. For instance, the noun adjective 綺麗 ends on an い, but is most definitely not a verbal adjective. A good indication is whether the adjective ends with something ending on い after its kanji form. Clearly, 綺麗 doesn't end on an い, but a real verbal adjective such as 楽しい ("enjoyable") does.
The bases for verbal adjectives are based on the concept of the adjectival stem, the gokan, 語幹. This is the part of the verbal adjective if you remove the final い.
| 語幹 | remove the last い |
| 未然形 | stem + く |
| 連用形 | stem + く |
| 連体形 | stem + い |
| 已然形 | stem + けれ |
As mentioned, an adjective has no 命令形 of its own. To create a commanding form for an adjective, the 連用形 is combined with the commanding form of aru (ある), meaning "to exist" for inanimate things. This would be stem + く + あれ, but the く+あ sound contracts to form か instead, so the "commanding form" for a verbal adjective is stem + かれ. A more common way to issue a command involving an adjective is to not so much say "be [adjective]", but "become [adjective]". This can be done using the adverbial form of adjectives (the 連用形) paired with the verb なる, to become, in commanding form なれ.
Before we continue with the nominal word class, we should take some time to look at a couple of important verbs used in Japanese because they are both common and special.
2.1.1.5.1. desu (da) / aru / iru - です (だ) / ある / いる
Where in English the verb "to be" is used for both the copula (the verb that sets up definitions such as "A is B") and existential verb (the verb that indicates existence somewhere such as "A is [here]"), in Japanese these are two (or more accurately three), distinct things. To indicate that A is B, the polite copula verb です or plain copula だ are used. These verbs can only be used to couple attributes to something, such as for instance "the chair is wooden" or "Kimiko is Japanese".
The existential verb on the other hand is actually two verbs in Japanese, one describing existence for animate objects and the other describing existence for inanimate objects, being iru, いる (居る), and aru, ある (有る), respectively. To illustrate the difference between animate and inanimate, let's look at two sentences:
| 犬がいる。 |
| [There] is a dog. |
| 本がある。 |
| [There] is a book. |
In both sentences が marks the preceding part as subject of the sentence. Both sentences translate to "there is X", but in the first sentence X is a dog, which is an animate object, and thus いる is used. In the second sentence X is a book, which is rather inanimate, and thus ある is used. Also, in both sentences "there" is an implied concept. Because we are using verbs to mark existence and we are talking about actual instances of dogs and books, saying they exist means we also say they exist at some location, even if this location isn't explicitly given.
If instead we only want to define something, i.e. say something "is" a thing, such as "it is a dog" or "it is a book", we use です or its informal version だ. For most people used to western language, these verbs may at first glance seem to do the same as what ある / いる do. After all, the sentence "it is a dog" is essentially the same as the sentence "there is a dog" with the word "there" replaced with "it". However, there is a very important difference: in "there is a dog" , we are saying that a dog exists somewhere, whereas in "it is a dog", we are defining some "it" to be of the category "dog". In terms of what this means these are two wildly different concepts - if we were to replace "there" with "it" while keeping these roles in mind, we could suddenly define something called "there" as being of the category "dog"...
To put it concisely, definitions in Japanese can only be done with です/だ, and existence can only be done with いる/ある.
| 犬です。 |
| It is a dog. |
| 本だ。 |
| It is a book. |
| 本は四角いです。 |
| Books are rectangular. |
| 犬は動物だ。 |
| Dogs are animals. |
We're not quite done with ある yet, because ある is also used in the role that in English is taken by "to have" in sentences like "I have a radio". In Japanese, you don't say you "have" something, but that "something is with you". For instance, if I want to say that aside from my portable radio I also have a radio at home instead of saying "I have a radio at home too" I would say "there is a radio at my house too":
| うちもラジオがある。 |
| I have a radio at home too. |
Because of this double role, it's quite an important verb.
2.1.1.5.3. aru (one last time)
There is one final thing to know about ある. While not a true irregular verb, ある has an irregularity for its plain negation. Since ある means "to be" for animate verbs, and since the adjective ない means "is not". The informal negation for ある is actually this adjective, rather than あらん or あらない (this is not the case in several dialects, but for standard Japanese, it is).
| ラジオがない。 |
| 1) There is no radio. |
| 2) I do not have a radio. |
The Japanese sentence can mean both things due to the fact that ある can mean two things.
We've already seen する as irregular verb, where I told you it meant "to do". This is true in general, but it's not the only meaning for する. When used as a direct transitive verb, する means to do. However, when used as indirect transitive verb, it means "to decide on"/"to choose". Since you may not be familiar with these concepts, a brief explanation: direct transitive verbs describe an action being performed on something. For instance in "I eat an apple", the act of eating is applied to an apple. Similarly, In "the kids make music", the act of making is applied to music. In contrast to direct transitivity, there are also indirect transitive verbs. For instance in "I decide on having cake" I don't decide "having cake", but I decide "to have cake". In the sentence itself, the verb "decide" indirectly applies to "having cake". Many verbs will be both direct and indirectly transitive: "I give flowers to my girlfriend" has a direct component, "give flowers" and an indirect component, "give to [someone]".
To show the difference in meaning between the direct and indirect version of する, two short sentences:
| 何をするか - What are [you] doing? |
| 何にするか - What will [you] decide on? |
In the first sentence, を marks the preceding as direct object to the verb, while in the second sentence, に marks the preceding part as indirect object to the verb. The difference in meaning is striking.
There is a third meaning to する, when paired with と, which is "to consider something ...":
| これが私が必要とするものです。 |
| These are the things I consider important. |
Before you can say something "is" something else, it first has to "become" this something else. In Japanese, "to become" is expressed with the verb なる, which can be used to describe the "becoming" of states ("to become cold") using adjectives (which need to be modified to adverbs for this), the "becoming" of things ("to become an adult") using nouns, or to just describe the process of "becoming" in some way using adverbs ("to quickly become [...]").
2.1.1.5.6. kakeru (tr) / kakaru (intr) - 掛ける / 掛かる
These two verbs are part of the Japanese "Swiss army knife verbs" group. A select group of verbs that are paired with a thousand and one things to mean as many things. The principle meaning for the transitive 掛ける is typically some form of "to begin to", and for the intransitive 掛かる "to take/to require", but it's not always obvious.
Examples of かける being used are things such as:
| 火をかける | - to start a fire. |
| 声をかける | - "to start a voice" → to call/greet someone. |
| 問いをかける | - "to start a questioning" → to ask [someone] a question. |
| 電話をかける | - "to start a phone" → to call someone. |
Examples of かかる being used are things such as:
| 時間がかかる | - to take time. |
| 気にかかる | - "to require ki" → to weigh on one's mind. |
2.1.1.5.7. tsukeru (tr) / tsuku (intr) - 付ける / 付く
Another part of the "Swiss army knife" group, 付ける and its intransitive counterpart 付く are also very important verbs. Possibly more elusive than かける/かかる, both typically mean something like "adjoin"/"be adjoined to", "attach"/"be attached", "become part of/one with"/"be part of/one with".
Examples of 付ける being used are things such as:
| 話を付ける | - to settle an argument. |
| 気を付ける | - to be careful. |
| 身に付ける | - to make [some knowledge or behaviour] one's own. |
Examples of 付く being used are things such as:
| 目に付く | - to be noticeable. |
| 気が付く | - to notice. |
| 話が付く | - to come to an agreement. |
Nominals are words that act as nouns. In Japanese, there are three word classes that count as nominals. Firstly, of course, there's the nouns. Secondly, there's the noun adjectives, and finally, there are the kosoado, sometimes called Japanese pronouns.
There's not much to say about nouns. They're nouns, they do what nouns do (namely, nothing at all). Nouns can be genitively related to one another by using the particle の, in the pattern A の B, used to mean "A's B". This kind of genitive listing can be done for as many words as you like, just like you can in English: The housekeeper's sister's favourite radio programme's DJ's dog's collar.
2.1.2.2. Noun adjectives - 形容動詞
The noun adjective is different from the verbal adjective in that tenses for noun adjective are, like in English, formed using the copula verb. Noun adjectives are principally nouns, but instead of ending on an い, like verbal adjectives, they end on な when used as adjective. For example:
| きれい (綺麗) - pretty |
| きれいな人 - pretty person |
| 四角 - square |
| 四角な形 - square shape |
2.1.2.3. Pronouns, part 1: the "kosoado" (こそあど) - 代名詞
In Japanese rather than pronouns, kosoado (こそあど) words are used, named after the four prefixes that are used consistently to indicate the closeness of the "pronoun" to the speaker. To understand this, the concept of a personal zone is important: the Japanese do not separate locations in just "here" and "there", but actually use three levels of "somewhereness". Words starting with "ko" (こ) refer to things in the speaker's personal zone, words starting with "so" (そ) refer to things in the listener's personal zone, and words starting with "a" (あ) refer to things that are neither in the speaker's nor the listener's personal zone. Finally, words starting with "do" (ど) are the question word for the series.
There can be some confusion when こそあど words are called "pronouns", as several series are actually not pronouns, but require nouns to work. The most important of these is the following series:
| この[noun] - this [noun] |
| その[noun] - that [noun] |
| あの[noun] - that [noun] over there |
| どの[noun] - which [noun] |
As is obvious, this series is not actually a pronoun series since it doesn't replace the noun in question. Instead, it is an indicative set that is used in conjunction with a noun - something that a word called a "pronoun" cannot do. There are こそあど series that are real pronoun serious though, such as:
| これ - this. |
| それ - that. |
| あれ - that over there. |
| どれ - which. |
Notice the periods after the English translations; these have been added to make sure you understand that these words are "done." They are replacement nouns, and cannot be used in conjunction with a noun.
The rest of the common こそあど series are:
| こんな[noun] - this kind of [noun] |
| そんな[noun] - that kind of [noun] |
| あんな[noun] - that kind of [noun] over there |
| どんな[noun] - what kind of [noun] |
Beginning students may confuse どんな with the word 何 which means "what", when thinking of dialogues such as: "I bought a velour pillow" - "wow, what does that feel like?" While the dialogue uses the word "what" , the Japanese question would actually be "what kind of feeling does that have?"
| こちら - this direction/honourable person. |
| そちら - that direction/honourable person. |
| あちら - that direction/honourable person over there. |
| どちら - which direction/honourable person. |
This series can mean two things, depending on context. Since Japanese tries to avoid using personal pronouns, it is considered polite to refer to someone by referring to the direction in which they are located, relative to the speaker, similar to using the English indirect way of referring to someone: "Over here we have Mr. Carver", rather than just saying "This here is Mr. Carver".
| こっち - this direction/this person. |
| そっち - that direction/that person. |
| あっち - that direction over there/that person over there. |
| どっち - which direction/which person. |
Since this is a contracted version of the previous set, it cannot be used to refer to people respectfully - you don't use colloquially contracted words when you're being respectful. You can use this word to refer to people, but then only in a familiar conversation.
| こう - this way/manner. |
| そう - that way/manner. |
| ああ - that way/manner (referring to something distal). |
| どう - how/in which way/manner. |
Notice the seeming itregularity for ああ here. I say seeming, because this kosoado series is actually each of the four "prefixes" with a long vowel sound. While for こ, そ and ど this is a う, for あ this is of course not a う at all but another あ.
Finally, there is also a somewhat more classical series of which the こ- and そ- are not used all that frequently anymore:
| こなた - this person (I/me/you/him/he/her/she). |
| そなた - that person (him/he, her/she). |
| あなた - that person over there (you). |
| どなた - which person (who). |
Since this set is a tad classical, there are few things to notice. First of all, unlike expected, そなた refers to a third person (he/she), while あなた refers to second person (you). Also, while somewhat classical, this set is still used in formal setting. However, because it is used exclusively in formal settings it is considered distal and very impersonal, and should thus only be used in formal settings where it would be improper to address someone the normal way. As an added bonus, あなた is commonly understood to be two seemingly completely opposite things. On the one hand there is the deferred, distal, formal word for "you", and on the other hand it also means "you" in a highly intimate relationship, akin to the English term "darling" being used by couples to call each other's attention.
2.1.2.4. Pronouns, part 2: personal pronouns - 人代名詞
Some people may tell you that Japanese has no word for "you". These people are simply wrong - you avoid using "you" as much as possible in Japanese, referring to people by their family name suffixed typically with さん, or when appropriate, their title. This doesn't mean you never use "you" - there are in fact a great number of words meaning "you" that can be used when the need arises. However, all of them mean more than just that "you" and connote differences in social levels, as well as having different rudeness/politeness levels. Personal pronouns are quite often left out of a conversation unless strictly needed. This goes for all personal pronouns; Not just "you", but "I'/"me" is typically left alone after it's clear you're talking about yourself, as are "he"/"she", "they" and "we", most of the time. Japanese is a very context sensitive language, but that also means that everyone that's fluent in it knows when a context has been established. Since pronouns typically refer back to an already known party, in Japanese it doesn't make sense to continuously remind your conversational partner(s) who you're talking about - in fact it's considered bad Japanese.
That said, there are times when you need to use personal pronouns, mostly at the start of a conversation or when you really want to make a reference to someone so that there can be no misunderstandings about who you're talking to/about. When you do, it helps to know which personal pronoun is best suited for which situation.
First person pronoun - "I"
- 私, an overly formal version of "I". This personal pronoun is typically too formal for any situation you will be in.
- 私, the gender-neutral, formality-neutral personal pronoun for "I' or "me".
- 私, a female-only version of the formality-neutral person pronoun
- 僕, literally meaning servant. Used predominantly by men, this personal pronouns means you humble yourself in respect to the listener. While predominantly used by men, it can be used by women too.
- 俺, a boastful first person personal pronoun, which is used when you are confident that sounding boastful is accepted. Predominantly used by men, this can also be used by go-getting women.
Second person pronoun - "you"
- 君, a version of "you" that contains a slight element of looking down on someone. You are technically placing yourself socially higher when you use it.
- お前, a rough and almost rude way to say "you"
- 貴方, the distal, deferred way to say "you". Because it is very formal, it can also be considered impolite outside of very formal settings.
- あんた, the shortened version of あなた, this is roughly the same as using お前.
- 貴様, something to avoid. While 貴 means "pecious" or "honor", and 様 is an honourable suffix, this word has made a half turn from being used as a classicaly honorific pronoun to a modern day accusative pronoun, and is as close to a curse word without being one, as one could possibly get.
Third person pronoun - "he/her"
- 彼, while a neutral "he", is a word that should be avoided simply because it is considered bad practice to use personal pronouns. Because of this, using it at all is already slightly derogative to the person you're referring to if you know them by name.
- 彼女 , when used as personal pronoun, has the same connotation as 彼, except for girls. However, in addition to being a personal pronoun it can also mean "girlfriend" as a regular noun (with the noun version of 'boyfriend' being 彼氏).
Japanese has no explicit plurals, so you might think that expressing "we" or "them" might require separate words too, but this is not the case. There exist "group" suffixes in Japanese that can be used with person pronouns to turn the single person "me" into the group "we", the single person "you" into the group "you [people]" and the single persons "he"/"she" into the group "them":
| ～達 - This is the common group-suffix for turning personal pronouns into personal group pronouns. However note the following suffix: |
| ～等 - This suffix is an older group suffix and can be used to turn お前 (you) into お前等 (plural you), 彼 (he) into 彼等 (them) and 貴様 (accusative you) into 貴様等 (plural accusative you) |
When using group suffixes for 彼 or 彼女, it depends entirely on the gender of the first person in the group that you refer to. If there's a group of mixed gender but you were just talking about a female member of the group, then the entire group can be referred to using 彼女達. Similarly, if a male member of the group was talked about, 彼等 will refer to the exact same group.
It should be noted that these markers are not true plural markers. 私達 literally means "the group I am part of", and can refer to either a physical group gathered at some point in time at a specific location, or can refer to someone's in group. Similarly, 等 is also a group marker, where for instance お前等 means "the group you are part of". It is important to remember this, as some translations for sentences that have plural personal pronouns cannot use these 達/等 markers:
"As the committee on social affairs we have decided to ...."
This kind of sentence, in which someone speaks for an entire group, requires the "group representative" personal pronoun "wa" or "ware", 我, typically used in the pattern "我が/は [...]". If one does not just speak as a representative of a group, but speaks in name of the entire group, rather than using the group suffixes 達 or 等, the special word "wareware", 我々, is used.
The most important thing to remember is to try to use personal pronouns as little as possible. Instead, if you're referring to someone of whom you know the name, use their name suffixed with さん instead. If you do not know their name, find out what it is. The only polite way to refer to people is as people - don't refer to them as mere objects by using pronouns.
Japanese has two nouns which are of such importance that they deserve to be looked at on their own. these two words are koto, 事, and mono, 物. Together they cover the way in which the Japanese tend to use language, not to mention essentially the entire universe.
You could probably write a nice paper on why こと sums up the Japanese mind set. I will not use quite that much text for it, but it is hard to overestimate the pivotal role this word has when illustrating the difference between Western languages and Japanese.
こと means "concept", or "notion", and is used to not so much talk about an actual thing, but only the mental concept that exists for it. For instance, 歩く is a verb meaning "to walk", but 歩くこと means "the concept of walking". It raises the idea of walking from something concrete - namely, the act of walking - to something abstract - the mental notion of walking, and whatever this commonly entails.
This "talking about something on a level higher" is one of the reasons that Asia in general is considered more spiritual, since a lot of the time rather than talking about the actual things, they seem to be talking about the philosophical or spiritual abstractions. In the Japanese language this allows you to express things in relation to your thoughts, or your concepts, rather than the real thing. For instance, if one doesn't like a particular person, it might just as well be that the person themselves is a normal person, but the mental image you have of them is something you do not like. You could say "I do not like you", but that's direct (something that you try not to be in Japanese, unless it's a familiar setting), or you can say "I do not like your こと". This way, you shift the disliking from the actual person to what your concept is of them - in essence, you've shifted the fault away from them, to potentially lying with yourself.
Of course, in real life nearly no one's going to realise that's what they're doing on a day to day basis as they're too busy just living and doing what it is they do every day, but it does pose a foothold into understanding why the Japanese language works the way it does (I wonder what Immanuel Kant would have thought of this...)
In contrast to the abstract "thing" that こと describes, もの expresses a more real "thing". Real should not be confused with tangible here though. For instance, one's childhood is real, but intangible, much like the feeling you get while being in the presence of someone you don't like is real, but intangible. In contrast, the concept of having a childhood is not real, but purely a mental concept, much like your beliefs on why someone would be disliked aren't necessarily real, but merely your own interpretation of the universe.
もの thus refers to real things, both tangible and intangible - it can refer to things like an old couch or a building or something you can eat, but it can also be used to described things such as 'having been raised properly'. This "thing", while intangible, is not something that merely exists as concept, it's something you underwent as a child, and as such is very real. Because of this, もの can be used to mean a lot of things. It can be used to talk about past experiences, it can be used to illustrate established social customs, and can be used to emphasise a speaker believes something is real enough to act as a reason for something.
This difference between these two nouns then is a complex one, and just reading about them isn't enough to drive the point home; one typically needs to hear こと and もの used time and again until one can intuit the use of both. The description just given should really only be considered a (small) foothold for when one starts to study Japanese in earnest - these two words together are powerful enough to describe the entire physical as well as mental universe.
Not unlike many other languages, both Asian and western, Japanese is a language that allows the creation of new words by simply affixing one word to another. These types of words are called compound words. English isn't that rich in compound nouns, but there are enough examples to choose from: for instance, the word "teapot" is a compound noun consisting of the noun "tea" and the noun "pot". In Japanese, compound verbs, compound adjectives and compound nouns are all possible, as well as noun-verb/verb-noun compounds and noun-adjective/adjective-noun compounds.
Some say that this means that the Japanese vocabulary can be reduced to a "real" subset of only the individual words, because compound words are just the sum of their parts, but as is the case in many languages where compound words are common rather than rare, in Japanese this is simply not the case. While for adjective and noun compounds it is quite often the case that the compound is merely the sum of the individual words, for many verb compounds the compound meaning isn't just both meanings of the verbs used to make it. Typically, these type of compounds have a meaning that carries extra nuance, or sometimes even a seemingly different meaning from what one would expect based on the individual verbs.
Japanese also has adverbs, words that modify not nouns but verbs. In English, adverbs are words like "quickly" in "Simone quickly ran for the door." or "majestically" in "The butterfly flew majestically." In Japanese there are two kinds of adverbs. The first are words that have always been adverbs, and the second are adjectives that are placed in a particular inflection so as to act adverbially.
The first type of adverbials are mostly quantifiers. Words such as sukoshi, 少し, meaning "a little bit", zutto, ずっと, meaning "very much"/"throughout" or tokidoki, 時々, meaning "sometimes".
The second type can be constructed out of either verbal adjectives, or noun adjectives. However, the way they are inflected to become adverbs is different for the two. Verbal adjectives are placed in their 連用形 form, and can then be used as an adverb. For instance, the verbal adjective hayai, 早い meaning "early" can be made an adverb by placing it in its 連用形: 早く. This can then be used with for instance the verb for "waking up", okiru, 起きる: 早く起きる - to wake up early.
Noun adjectives can be turned into adjectives by instead of adding な as suffix, adding に as suffix. For instance, きれい is a noun adjective meaning "pretty", きれいに is an adverb meaning pretty. If we pair this with the verb for "to split", 分ける we get きれいに分ける meaning "to cleanly split" (such as a watermelon on a hot day)
Some linguists claim that the more evolved a language is, the less onomatopoeia (sound words) a language has. While this might be true for western languages, for Japanese this claim is about as unfounded as possible. Japanese has a rich onomatopoeic vocabulary, with several thousand words to describe the various sounds things make ("the cow goes moo"), as well as words to describe the state of things ("the tree stood looming" - these are called mimesis). Unlike western language, Japanese doesn't use these just for children's books and comics, but they're an integral part of the natural every day language. If you would hear someone say "I fell asleep on the bus and went zzz all the way to work. I almost missed my stop" in English you'd wonder about their conversational skill, but in Japanese that sentence would be both a grammatical as well as natural sounding sentence.
Onomatopoeia are words that reflect the sound things make. In Japanese, a statement such as "the water went drip drip down the sink" can mean various different things depending on the exact choice of onomatopoeia for "drip drip". One could for instance use "taratara", たらたら, which is the sound of a steady regular dripping, or "daradara", だらだら which is a heavier sound. One could also use "botabota", ぼたぼた, which is a fuller sound and implies big drops, or "tarari tarati", たらりたらり, which would imply it's only dripping intermittently. One could even use "pisha", ぴしゃ, so that it's the sound of only a single drop hitting something.
This is a very complex use of sound words, something which in English is simply impossible because it lacks both the vocabulary for it, as well as the acceptance of using onomatopoeia in regular speech.
Like sounds, object properties can have words associated to them too. For instance, a gem can go "sparkle sparkle" and someone can look like they want to say "bleh". In Japanese, again, there is a great number of state describing words that can be used, with again typically multiple words being usable for a situation with each word carrying their own added nuance. For instance, something that feels soft could be "fuwafuwa", ふわふわ, for fluffy soft, "kutakuta", くたくた, for being sort of squishy and soft, "funyafunya", ふにゃふにゃ, for sort of a flaccid softness, or it could be "kunyari", くにゃり, to indicate it's soft and lacks tension.
Quite often 擬音語 and 擬態語 can be paired with "to suru", とする, to turn the sound word into a verb. For instance, "kirakira", きらきら, means "sparkle sparkle", such as what gems or the surface of a lake when the light hits it do. If we add とする we get きらきらとする, which would literally mean "to do sparkle sparkle", and translates more naturally as just "to sparkle".
2.1.6. Particles and modifiers
Japanese, unlike western languages, doesn't tuck its grammar away in word interplay. Instead parts of speech are explicitly tagged using particles such as は (marking topic), が (marking verb subject), か (marking something as question), を (marking direct verb object) and a wide variety of other "particles". All these grammatical particles are suffixes, meaning that first the actual content is written, followed by a marker to specify what the preceding part should be interpreted as. There are many classes of particles, which we'll briefly go over here.
2.1.6.1. Denoting grammar explicitly
One of the most important sets of particles is the one that tells you which parts of a sentence should be considered which grammatical structure. The most important of these are probably the subject and verb object marker, but there are more:
- は marks a sentence topic. As a particle, this is always pronounced as わ
- が marks the verb subject (for passive verbs) or actor (for active verbs).
- を marks the verb direct object. As a particle, this is always pronounced as お.
- に marks the verb's indirect object, and marks the destination of a targeted verb action (there are actually more meanings for に, but these two are most essential).
- で marks the location at which a verb action is performed.
- も marks cross-sentence similarity marker.
- と marks closed noun listing particle.
- の denotes a genitive relation from the preceding part of the sentence to the following part (see nouns section).
Sentences can have wildly different meanings depending on which particles are used. For instance, let us look at the following sentence:
| 昨日は犬が私の晩ご飯を食べました。 |
| Yesterday (topic marker) a dog (subject marker) I (genitive marker) dinner (direct object) ate. |
This sentence reads "Yesterday, a dog ate my dinner" in normal English. Now, if we were to replace some particles in the sentence so that it instead reads the following:
| 昨日は犬を私が晩ご飯に食べました。 |
| Yesterday (topic marker) a dog (direct object) I (subject) dinner (indirect object) ate. |
then this sentence now suddenly reads "Yesterday, it was I who ate the dog for dinner". A rather striking difference to say the least!
You may be wondering whether it is a problem that the sentence clauses now seem "unordered", but in Japanese this is actually not a problem. The best way to see this is to look at the Japanese sentences and ask yourself if you know what "proper order" is for Japanese at this point. While in English this would probably mess things up horribly, Japanese uses explicit grammar, so the order of all the little subcomponents doesn't actually matter that much; the clauses can be as unordered as possible, but as long as the right particles are used and the sentence ends with the operative verb, we are dealing with a perfectly grammatical sentence.
2.1.6.2. Postpositions instead of prepositions
Prepositions in English such as "in", "to", "for", "by", "over" and the like are in Japanese nearly all represented either by particles or by genitives paired with a directional or positional noun. The latter approach isn't very interesting because it's not hard to imagine that "above the closet" and "at the closet's above" are basically the same sentence, but the first approach is definitely interesting; there are several particles that act in a way that prepositions act in English, and a small list of these would include the following particles:
- に as (1) from above, it means "for" or "to", such as "I bought flowers for my host", or "I gave the book to the clerk."
- に as (2) from above, it means "to" similar to "We're going to Tokyo."
- へ also translates to "to" in terms of "We're going to Tokyo", but is more subtle. Instead of standing for the destination of a targeted verb, へ stands for the general direction in which the action takes place. Thus, a more accurate translation would be "We're going in the direction of Tokyo." Also, as a particle this is always pronounced as え.
- から means "from" such as in "We came from New York", or "I will be available from 10 p.m."
- まで means "up to"/"until" such as in "We're going up to Tokyo" or "We'll be busy until 3 o' clock."
- より is used to indicate a comparison where the clause preceding より is less [something] than the clause following it.
- しか expresses "save", such as "save for church, I didn't go anywhere today."
- だけ expresses "only", such as "I only went jogging today."
2.1.6.3. Modifiers and nominalisers
Some suffixes are also used to nominalise ("turn into a noun") sentences, so they can be used as sub-phrases in more complex sentences. We do this in English too, such as for instance "Every time I see a dog, I get nervous" where the sentences "I see a dog" and "I get nervous" are placed in the larger, more complex, sentence pattern "Every time A, B". In Japanese things like "Every time A, B" and other more complex sentence patterns can be created by using nominalisers such as the following:
- 場合 turns a phrase into a component meaning "every time ..."
- 筈 turns a phrase into an expectancy, such as "I expect the boat to arrive at 2".
- 度 turns a phrase into a component meaning "when ..."
- 時 t