Basic Grammar
One of the most important things I want to clarify at the beginning is the most basic Japanese grammar. The Genki textbook does its very best to avoid the topic, maybe because it believes that the grammar is so wildly different than our own, and that it would be scary to students. Well, Japanese grammar is very different; however, it is very logical, and really believe that you will be able to follow if we take it one step at a time.
Particles
Particles are some of the most important words in Japanese. My goal here is just to explain the concept of them and how they’re used.
When you make a sentence in Japanese, you mark the role of nouns using a particle. When you want to say that a noun is the doer of the action (a.k.a the subject), you attach a が to the end of the noun. You don’t need to do anything else. To mark a noun as the receiver of the action (a.k.a. the direct object), attach を. It’s that simple.
In the following example, know that ける is the verb meaning to kick, わたし is the noun meaning me or I, and ぼーる is the noun that means ball.
わたしが ぼーるを ける。
Note: in the above sentence, I used spaces between words for clarity. Japanese does not use normally use spaces.
The sentence means “I kick the ball.” I is marked as the doer of the action, ball is marked as the receiver of the action, and to kick ends, or predicates, the sentence.
There are many particles in addition to が and を, and I will be introducing and clarifying them as we progress.
Structure
Imagine that every word in a Japanese sentence is part of a train. A train needs two things: an engine, to move the train, and carriages, to carry the load. The same goes for the Japanese language: there are words in Japanese that can act as the engine, and words that act as carriages. Spoiler: engines are verbs and carriages are nouns + particles.
In Japanese, engines come at the end of the sentence. Carriages can be placed anywhere before the engines.
In this lesson, I’ll introduce one type of engine and one type of carriage.
The engine
There are three types of “engines” in Japanese—each of them can pull the nouns and dependent clauses in a sentence. The first one I’ll introduce is the copula. You have most definitely heard it in class: です. です is very similar to the English verb to be. What you may not know is that there are two other versions of the copula: だ and である. Japanese has a system of politeness built into the language, and changing the verb is one way to express politeness. For now, you can use です, which is the polite copula, but know that だ is the plain version of the copula.
The word copula is a Latin word that means to couple or to link, and that’s what this engine does. It links two nouns together, just like the English word is. The first word is marked with が (which I talk about below), and the second word attaches to です. You cannot have です without a word attached to it.
The carriage
Remember, a carriage is made of a noun + a particle. The first carriage I’d like to explain is “noun + が.” I covered it a bit in the Particles section, but I want to talk about a couple more things here. First, が is the core of the Japanese sentence. Every sentence must have a が, even if it is not explicitly said. That’s because, in Japanese, anything that you know from context can be left out. For example, if I said “I am a student,” I could say that as わたしが がくせいです。However, if we already know that we are talking about me, we can leave it out: がくせいです。The わたしが is still there, but we don’t need to say it because it’s understood.
Here is a visual representation of the train we have just assembled:
___________________ __
_______________ ================= \ /
[ ] = = ||
[ わたしが ] = がくせいです ==============___
[ が ] = ====== です ]_/
===============----==============================]
____(_)_(_)_(_)________\__/____________(_)_(_)_(_)_\\___
========================================================
Up Next
So you might be thinking right about now: “What the heck? I thought you equated two things with 「ｘはｙです」!” Don’t you worry! That is still correct. I’ll explain why on the next page.