![]() ![]() It can be attached to the first or last name. When we are talking about someone among peers or public settings, we should add さん (san) to the end of their name. Japanese people usually use the name of the person instead of the pronoun. This can also be used to mean “girlfriend”.Īn important note to make here is that Japanese personal pronouns are not used as often as the English “you, “she” and “he”. This is much softer than Ore and is used by younger boys as well. This can also be used to mean “boyfriend”. It has a very rough image and usually used in a very casual setting with someone close. Replacing the pronoun with their name is usually better for most situations. This is gender neutral, but is usually seen as more feminine in casual conversation. Each one of these can substitute for A in our sentence “ A wa B desu“. Now that we have learned basic Japanese sentence construction with WA (は) and DESU (です), let’s take a look at a list of Personal Pronouns that you can use. なん (nan) can be used to ask what something is. The response may be はい (hai) which means yes. It is similar to an English question mark (“ ?“). If you want to get serious about learning Japanese though, you should start learning Hiragana and Katakana as soon as you can.Īsking questions with か (ka) and なん (nan). Learning your first phrases with the English alphabet is perfectly acceptable, in my opinion – especially if time is a factor. You will find that some people reject the idea of Romaji as a useful tool because it acts as a “crutch”, but I believe there is more than one path to learning a language. Please consider visiting my Reading and Writing section to get started if you haven’t yet. However, learning the Hiragana and Katakana writing system should be high on your priority list because it’s the foundation of the Japanese language. While the Japanese writing system consists of it’s own characters “Hiragana” and “Katakana”, it is possible for a beginner to start practicing full sentences right away without being distracted by a new syllabary. Romaji literally means “Roman letters” in Japanese, which you know as the alphabet. Up to this point, I have been using the western representation of Japanese sounds to help you. Just keep that in mind as we keep pushing forward. What you will find however, is that Japanese will drop the topic/subject a lot more than we do in English! That will become more apparent as we continue on with the lessons. In our example, someone asks “What is your name?” Responding with “Keiko” rather than “I am Keiko” is fine. Whatever you want to call it, always place it at the end of the statement!īy the way, a topic can be dropped from a sentence if the context is already understood. You may find a lot of textbooks referring to desu as the “ copula“. です (desu) is similar to “ is” or “ am” in English. In English we don’t attach anything to our topics, so this may seem strange at first. Since watashi is our topic, we need to attach は (wa). In this case, the topic is our personal pronoun, “ watashi“. は (wa) always comes after the topic of the sentence. We can place it at the beginning of the sentence. Let’s break it down – starting with the first word, watashi. The other word, “ am” is colored blue and is equivalent to “ desu“. This is because they share a similar purpose in the sentence. For example, “ I” is represented with the color green in the English reading, and so is “ Watashi wa” in the Japanese above it. but it was also my best attempt to match the Japanese words with the English ones. Believe it or not, the heavy use of colors wasn’t just for fun. Please pay close attention to the way I colored the words. Now I’m going to show you a Japanese sentence. If I were to introduce myself, I would use the same structure: This concept of “ A is B” is the most basic form of a sentence in any language. Before we begin to learn basic Japanese grammar, let’s take a step back and look at how we make a basic sentence in English: ![]()
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