![]() ![]() Depending on the context, however, some of them can be close to English prepositions such as “to, from, in, at, on, etc.” What’s tricky for beginners at first, is that Japanese particles can rarely be translated because they have no counterpart in English. We see that the particle は marks the subject, を the direct object and に the indirect object. where the action is done, or where it’s from or going to,Īs you can see in the example below, は and を show the relationship between pieces of information (John, bread) and the verb (eat).Plainly saying, they assign a role to words and groups of words, telling us: Particles are grammatical markers, or suffixes, that you attach to nouns, adjectives, verbs and even sentences, to assign them a grammatical function. How Do Particles Work in Japanese Sentence Structure The words are the bricks and the particles act like the cement that sticks them all together. Take a Japanese sentence and imagine it’s like a wall made of bricks. These little words are what we call grammatical particles. Looking back at one of our examples, you can see the adjunction of little words to nouns and verbs. Japanese Sentence Structure: Particles You Must Know A sentence starts with a subject – a noun or pronoun for example, followed by a verb and one or more objects.īut in Japanese, the word order is more flexible and words can be arranged in various ways. ![]() The order is here to tell us the grammatical function of each word or group of words. Now, in English and most romance languages, the word order is rigid because it serves a purpose. So as your vocabulary expands, you build more complex sentences, adding bits of information between the subject and the verb. Of course, like in English, a sentence can also contain nouns, adjectives and additional verbs. The very first rule you learn is that a Japanese sentence only needs a verb to be grammatically complete. ![]() So having a fundamental understanding of how Japanese sentence structure works is important to help you get the pieces in a flash. You can still guess the meaning, but as you keep on learning Japanese and build more complex sentences, literal translations in English are like puzzles you need to reassemble. Here’s another example, with a more complex sentence:īetween “John” and the final verb “gave”, you’ll have two groups of words which translate “to me” and “bread”. While the order is off in English, you can easily infer the meaning: “John eats bread”. Here’s a short sentence to help you visualize how a simple Japanese sentence looks like: Japanese sentence structure vs English sentence structure Speaking very simply, the word order is different in Japanese, with the object coming in between the subject and the verb. Japanese, in comparison, is an SOV, Subject-Object-Verb, language. Well, that’s because English (and romance languages in general) is an SVO, Subject-Verb-Object, language. The word order will kind of look the opposite of what it should be in an English sentence. Japanese Sentence Structure: How are Japanese sentences structured?Īt the beginning, Japanese sentence structure will confuse you, especially if you try to translate the sentence literally.
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