LingoDeer 1: Nationality
1. Categories of Japanese words
By looking at the origins of words in Japanese, Japanese words can be divided into three groups: Wago, Kango, and Gairaigo.
Wago originates from the traditional Japanese language. Every word in Wago has its own unique pronunciation. In most of the cases, Wago words have their corresponding Kanji forms.
Kango words started to appear around the 5th/6th century as a result of the cultural influence from ancient China. These are either words directly imported from Chinese characters or words newly created in Japan based on the Chinese terms.
Gairaigo was developed mainly under the influence of western languages, and its pronunciation is marked by katakana.
2. Basic Sentence: N1はN2です (N1 is N2)
This is a simple basic declarative sentence structure in Japanese. N1 and N2 both stand for nouns.
“は” is the topic marking particle in Japanese and usually follows a noun. Its purpose is to introduce the topic of a sentence. Hence, the noun before “は” is the focus of the sentence. When used as a topic marker, “は” is no longer pronounced “ha” but “wa”.
“です” is the predicate part of the sentence, it “declares” the state-of-being of the subject N1, which can be interpreted as “to be” in English. It’s also one of the ending for Japanese declarative sentences.
3. N1はN2ではありません (N1 is not N2)
This is the negative form of the previous expression.
“ではありません“ is the negation of “です” (to be).
“は“ in “ではありません“ should also be pronounced “wa”.
We can also say “じゃありません” which is a more casual style of speech.
4. Sentence structure in Japanese
The word order of Japanese sentences is different from the one English speakers are familiar with. Instead of “Subject-Verb-Object”, Japanese sentences follow the order of “Subject-Object-Verb”.
5. Japanese Particles
The key to learning Japanese is the understanding of particles. The Japanese language relies heavily on particles, as they connect words together to form a complete sentence. Simply stacking words together does not make a Japanese sentence sensible. Basically every word needs to be followed by a particle to indicate what role the word plays in a sentence.
In the sentence “私は日本語を勉強します”, “私は” is the topic and “日本語を” is the object.