In this post, let’s look at the ending section of Japanese sentences. This is where you have the chance to add shades of nuance to your sentences when you speak or write. Understanding what you hear / read in the ending is very, very helpful to understanding Japanese. I’ve picked 5 common endings that you will definitely come across as you study and encounter natural Japanese.
か is a very simple sentence ending. It’s used to change a statement into a question. か can work alone to make questions, but it can also tag team with question words.
If we were to remove the sentence ending か from both examples, what we have left? Example 1 would say “As for him, he is a teacher.” However example 2 would say, “As for that person, he/she is who?” This is already a question of sorts.
Interestingly, the か in example 2 works together with the question word 誰 to enhance the question. The question word 誰 acts like a placeholder while the actual answer to the question will simply replace 誰.
The next ending is one we have actually talked about already. You’ll remember that there are only three kinds of predicates - verbs, adjectives and noun-copula pairs. You’ll also remember that politeness is very important in Japanese. Both nouns and verbs have ways to “increase their politeness level.” Nouns can use the polite versions of the copula (です、でした、etc.) and verbs can change their endings to ます、ました、ません etc. However, adjectives don’t have any endings to change their politeness.
That is where this special です comes in. Its one and only purpose is to add politeness to adjectives, so it goes in the ending section, after the predicate.
= luck is good (and so) that was good
= I’m happy about your good luck.*
Notice that the ending of the adjective is not important. It doesn’t matter whether the adjective ends in -い、-かった、-くない or -くなかった, you simply place です in the ending section and you will be showing politeness to your listener / reader.
Ok now stay with me on this one.
So you know in police interrogation scenes how the police detectives are sitting on one side of the table and the suspect is on the other? Sometimes the police reveal that they have some implicating evidence on the suspect, usually a picture or a document of some kind. Then they do that move where they slide the paper across the table. This is kind of like the idea of よ.
よ can be used when you think that the information in the comment section is new to the listener / reader. Now you may ask, “ But Al, isn’t the information in the comment section ALWAYS new?”
I’m glad you asked! (1) I’m a human, not AI and (2) yes you are right. 😀 Adding よ to your sentence may result in the other person being shocked. Or it may be something they already know. The point is that you want to draw attention to the fact within the conversation. よ is one way to add emphasis to what you’re saying. Here is an example:
= as for this video, it’s wonderful I tell you!
The nuance in example 5 is that maybe the listener doesn’t know / realize that the video is great. The speaker wants the other person to know. It also may be that both people actually know that it is a great video, but the speaker simply wants to emphasize the fact. That is the point of the よ.
ね is simply used as a soft way to confirm that you and the other person are on the same page.
= as for having a child, it’s difficult… isn’t it?
= Having a child is difficult right?
The implication here is that the speaker already has a child and thinks that having one is difficult. In addition, the speaker thinks that the listener has already realized this and will agree.
Now let’s look at how the nuance would change if you were to replace ね with a different ending:
よ - this might be used if the speaker has a child but the listener doesn’t.
か - because this marks a question, this might be used if the speaker doesn’t have a child, but the listener does.
nothing - this makes the statement a simple fact. There is no assumption about whether the listener has a child or not.**
As you can see and as you will hear / read, you have a lot of flexibility with sentence endings! It all depends on the situation, the relationship between speaker and listener, and what nuance(s) each person wants to convey.
Before we continue, it’s important to make note of something. Japanese is considered a fairly agglutinative language. That means that in order to change properties of a word or sentence, you add attachments as opposed to changing it completely.
If you have the word 食べなかった, it contains a base word (食べ) and then 2 attachments. な tells us that it is a negative form and then かった tells us that it is a past form. When we hear this word, we hear and process each attachment and instantly understand it to mean “did not eat”. Had we used the attachment ます, it would mean “eats” and would also show respect to the listener / reader.
In a similar way, sentence endings can also be attached to each other to “add up” nuances. If you want to emphasize something in a polite way, it’s ok to add ですよ to the ending.
= As for that teacher, asking questions is ok I tell you
= It’s ok to ask that teacher questions.
If you want to softly confirm something while emphasizing the information but in a polite way, it’s ok to add ですよね to the ending.
= This cake is a little big
You do have to be careful of the order of your attachments. よね is possible but ねよ is not.
Finally let’s end with ことになる. There are actually 3 JLPT grammar points connected to this one phrase, but for now let’s just look at the most commonly-used one:
At first glance this sentence may look difficult, but let’s try something: Completely ignore the sentence ending and try to understand the topic and comment sections first. (After all, you don’t hear the ending until… the end anyway!)
町の料理教室 means the town cooking class. It can either be an actual classroom, or it can be a kind of class that someone or some group teaches. The には tells us that the topic is “in” this class.
Next we look at the comment section. 中学生以上の子ども means children that are junior high school students or older. We haven’t talked about this yet but も gives the sense of “even”. Finally 参加できる means “is / are able to participate”. With this last part, now we understand that it’s not a classroom, but a class and we understand that the “in” means “participate in”!
So the idea is that junior high school students and older can participate in this town’s cooking class. But what does ことになりました add!? The answer is, it means “has been decided”. ことになる is a way to say that some decision has been reached without actually saying who decided it. Maybe the person/people teaching the class decided. Perhaps the class is being taught at the town hall or a community center and they are the ones that decided. We don’t know and actually we don’t need to know. The point is that it was decided by some unknown entity. This is great for saying the result of decisions without putting the heat on who decided it. Yummy, Japanese-grade vagueness! 😉
ことになる is actually the reason I came up with the whole idea of the ending section. At some point I noticed that if I just stopped reading after I reached the predicate - and then focused on what came after it, I understood better what was really going on. Then I noticed that I could do this with a majority of sentences and that it helped speed up my comprehension. The only thing you need to practice is finding that cut point - the end of the comment section and the beginning of the ending section.
I hope this post was helpful for you. Thanks for reading! As always, if you have any questions, requests or comments I’ll be happy to read them. See you next post!
* A very common construction is using the て form (for adjectives or verbs) or noun + で and then saying your feelings about what came before. In example 4, the speaker thinks it’s good that the listener has/had good luck. Also note that 良かった is past tense but talks about one’s current feelings.
** Ending a sentence with only the だ copula does add emphasis but also makes it sound a bit harsh. Despite what you may read in manga, this is not as common as you may think in spoken Japanese. But, the perceived harshness of だ goes well with the softness of ね and so 〜だね is often used together.
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