Tag: Grammar

Making Sense of Japanese Verbs

Japanese language, like any language, uses verbs a lot. But verbs in Japanese differ considerably from Indo-European languages in how verbs are constructed, conjugated and so on. This makes them pretty tricky to learn at first glance, but the good news is that the internal structure and logic is actually fairly straightforward. You just need to unlearn your native language to avoid casual mistakes.

Warning: This post assumes you can read hiragana script. Hiragana takes a bit of work upfront, but you can master it quickly, and be reading Japanese fairly well after that (kanji notwithstanding). You can see my articles here, here and here about it.

The first thing to understand is that Japanese, especially in conversation, has a lot of implicit and contextual meaning. So, you can leave out many parts of speech because it’s already implied, or you just know from the context. But usually a sentence needs at least a verb.

A: [did you eat?]

B: ん、たべた
(yeah, I ate)

This is a perfectly normal sentence in conversation. No subject, object or anything, just the verb (to eat, past-tense).

Also, as I alluded to earlier, the conjugations and usages differ from European languages. Let’s look at some examples. This chart doesn’t cover everything but covers some of the most essential forms.

ConjugationUsageExample “Godan” Verb : 読む・よむExample “Ichidan” Verb : 食べる・たべる
Dictionary formDictionary listing of verb, also used for subordinate clauses, recurring actions (e.g. I eat X daily), and also future tense!読む・よむ食べる・たべる
Polite formUsed in polite, formal speech, especially at work, talking to teachers, or one’s elders. Also used for future tense!読みます・よみます食べます・たべます
“Te” formExtremely useful. Links verbs together in sequence, or allows for other grammatical forms.読んで・よんで食べて・たべて
Simple PastCasual, past tense form. Similar to dictionary form, but expresses past tense.読んだ・よんだ食べた・たべた
Passive formWhen something is being done to you. (e.g. I am being eaten)読まれる・よまれる食べられる・たべられる

Note that I divided verbs by Go-dan (五段), and Ichi-dan (一段) verbs. This is important as each one has a slightly different conjugation process. Ichi-dan verbs, sometimes called “ru-verbs” because the dictionary form always ends in る “ru”, however not all verbs that end in る are ichi-dan verbs. Everything else are go-dan verbs because the dictionary form has five (“go”) possible endings: う “u”, つ “tsu”, る “ru”, ぬ “nu”, and む “mu”.

Speaking from personal experience, people who are first learning Japanese often learn the textbook polite form since they’re talking with other adults, and don’t want to be rude.

However, it’s far more useful to learn the dictionary form and the “te”-form. The dictionary form is useful form many grammatical forms, and for more complex sentence. Note to mention it also expresses future tense in the right context. Similarly, the “te” form is the base of many other grammatical forms.

To conjugate the “te”-form from the dictionary form, change the verb endings like so:

Dictionary Verb
ending		Becomes…Example beforeExample after
う (u)って (tte)言う・いう (iu)言って・いって (itte)
つ (tsu)って (tte)持つ・もつ (motsu)持って・もって (motte)
る (ru)って (tte)切る・きる (kiru)切って・きって (kitte)
る (ru), ichidanて (te)食べる・たべる (taberu)食べて・たべて (tabete)
く (ku)いて (ite)書く・かく (kaku)書いて・かいて (kaite)
ぐ (gu)いで (ide)急ぐ・いそぐ (isogu)急いで・いそいで (isoide)
む (mu)んで (nde)読む・よむ (yomu)読んで・よんで (yonde)

Similarly for the simple past tense, just change the “te” to “ta” like so:

Dictionary Verb
ending		Becomes…Example beforeExample after
う (u)った (tta)言う・いう (iu)言って・いった (itta)
つ (tsu)った (tta)持つ・もつ (motsu)持って・もった (motta)
る (ru)った (tta)切る・きる (kiru)切って・きった (kitta)
る (ru), ichidanた (ta)食べる・たべる (taberu)食べて・たべた (tabete)
く (ku)いた (ita)書く・かく (kaku)書いて・かいた (kaita)
ぐ (gu)いだ (ida)急ぐ・いそぐ (isogu)急いで・いそいだ (isoida)
む (mu)んだ (nda)読む・よむ (yomu)読んで・よんだ (yonda)

Using these simple tricks, you can do more complex forms, like converting a passive form verb to past-tense (i.e. the sushi is being eaten -> the sushi was eaten), and so on.

In fact, I believe when learning Japanese verbs, it’s best to record and list them like so:

dictionary-form, te-form

examples:
読む、読んで
食べる、食べて
切る、切って
着る、着て

This not only helps you memorize the basic grammatical forms, but helps you remember if it is an ichidan verb vs. godan verb. “By their te-form, ye shall know them…“1

Anyhow, that’s a brief look at Japanese verbs. It’s not necessary to learn all the forms and applications at first, but a good way to build solid fundamentals and branch into more advanced lessons more seamlessly.

Good luck and happy studying!

1 This was a trick, not to mention a joke, I learned recently while studying classic, Koine Greek. Nouns are recorded as a combination of nominative + genitive forms, while Greek verbs are listed by principal parts. There’s no reason why Japanese language tools can do the same, but I don’t see books really doing this. That’s a shame. Greek and Latin have been scrutinized and studied for centuries in the West, so the teaching tools and methods are very mature. Japanese language studies in the West are much newer, and lacking many of these handy mnemonics, tools, etc.

Measure Words in Japanese

a path leading to a Japanese shrine, with stone lanterns to one side in a row.

Authors’s note: shifting gears a bit as I clear out the blog backlog. 😆

“Measure words” or “counting words” are an interesting phenomenon found in many East Asian languages, but less so in Indo-European languages. This leads to some challenges with counting things.

In English, we might say “one sheet of paper” or “two sticks of incense” or “a box of nails”. But we wouldn’t say “three things of fish”. We say “three fish”, or “three chickens” or “two cows”. People too: two senators, one customer, or three employees. So the use of counting words in English is limited. From what I recall of Classical languages such as Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, it doesn’t exist at all.1 In Japanese, there are counting words for all of them, and some of these counting words can be pretty obscure.

Let’s look at some examples, but first, let’s review basic numbers from one to five:

NumberJapanese WordHiraganaKanji
1Ichi
(ee-chee)		いち一
2Ni
(nee)		に二
3San
(sahn)		さん三
4Shi, Yon
(yohn)		し、よん四
5Go
(goh)		ご五

Four is a special case since there two words for “four”, but for counting stuff, the word “yon” is used.

Anyway, let’s start with good entry-level counting words. For paper, and other flat things like it Japanese counts them with the word “mai” (枚), so counting sheets of paper looks like so (using Kanji):

  1. 一枚 – ichi mai (one sheet)
  2. 二枚 – ni mai (two sheets)
  3. 三枚 – san mai (three sheets)
  4. 四枚 – yon mai (four sheets)
  5. 五枚 – go mai (five sheets)

By the way, it is PERFECTLY normal to use Arabic Numerals for counting too, especially for numbers beyond three.

  • 1枚 – ichi mai (one sheet)
  • 2枚 – ni mai (two sheets)
  • 3枚 – san mai (three sheets)
  • 4枚 – yon mai (four sheets)
  • 5枚 – go mai (five sheets)

Anyhow, the important thing to understand grammatically speaking, is that counting words like this are treated like adverbs, and adverbs in Japanese IMMEDIATELY precede the verb they modify, as in this sentence:

紙を二枚使ったよ。

かみをにまいつかったよ。

kami wo nimai tsukatta yo. “I used two sheets paper”.

In this case, the counting word “ni mai” comes right before the verb to use (使った). It took me a long time to realize this. I kept using the incorrect grammar of nimai no kami wo tsukatta. This is wrong, but is more similar to English, hence my mistake. DO NOT DO THIS. Put the counting word just before the verb and you’ll sound a lot better.

Anyhow, mai is a nice easy counting word and frequently used. Another common counting word is “hon” (本) used for long things, bottles, sticks, and so on:

  1. 一本 – ip-pon (one stick)
  2. 二本 – ni hon (two sticks)
  3. 三本 – san bon (three sticks)
  4. 四本 – yon hon (four sticks)
  5. 五本 – go hon (five sticks)

Wait a minute. Some of them aren’t pronounced as “hon”. Japanese, like many languages, has a grammatical feature called “Sandhi”3 where certain sounds change to make them smoother. English has lots of Sandhi rules, Japanese has relatively few, but one rule is that the “h” sound sometimes becomes a “b” or “p” sound in some cases: n + h = nb, for example. Another rule is that the “chi” or “tsu” sound sometimes becomes a small “tsu”.

Unfortunately, Japanese has a lot of little use-cases like this for counting. There’s no easy way to say this: you just have to memorize these oddities. Most of them make sense when you say them out loud because they evolved to be smoother for native speakers.

But I digress. We’ve learned mai (枚) and hon (本).

Let’s move onto people. This one is particularly tricky:

  1. 一人 – hitori (one person)
  2. 二人 – futari (two people)
  3. 三人 – san nin (three people)
  4. 四人 – yo nin not yon-nin (four people)
  5. 五人 – go nin (five people)

Here, some of the words are complete different, and don’t fit a pattern. This is a somewhat extreme example, but it shows how some common-use cases just don’t always follow a pattern. There are times when you just have to memorize how to count something.

Similarly, for “things” (generic), there is a similar way to count:

  1. 一つ – hitotsu (a thing)
  2. 二つ – futatsu (two things)
  3. 三つ – mittsu (three things)
  4. 四つ – yottsu (four things)
  5. 五つ – itsutsu (five things)

When all else fails, use the generic counter above (except on people!). There are many situations where that is sufficient. If you happen to know the correct, more specific counting word, use that instead.

Anyhow, let’s get back to specific counters. For animals, things get interesting because there are multiple counting words. To list a few that we saw at the top of this post:

  • hiki (匹) – small animals and fish: ip-piki, ni hiki, san biki, yon hiki …
  • wa (羽)- birds and rabbits: ichi wa, ni wa, san wa, yon wa …
  • tō (頭) – large, or hoofed animals: it-tō, ni tō, san tō, yon tō …

So, two cows would be ni tō, while three chickens would be san wa, and three fishes would be san biki.

Let’s talk a bit about rarer counting words.

Tofugu has a great comprehensive list of all the counting words, and some of these are obscure even for Japanese people, but there’s a few worth calling out because they do come up.

You might think that chopsticks are counting using hon as we saw above, but it has its own counting word: “zen” (膳). A single pair of chopsticks is ichi zen (一膳), two pairs are ni zen (二膳), and so on. This counting word is ALSO used for bowls of rice, or bowls of beef and such.

Another example is “chō” (丁). The counting word is used for things like bowls of ramen and kitchen knives, among others. If you wanted to ask for three bowls of ramen, you could say:

ラーメンを3丁下さい。

ラーメンをさんちょうください。

Ra-men wo san-chō kudasai

This one is a bit obscure, but like “zen” (膳) it does come up from time to time, so it’s good to be aware of it.

As I alluded to earlier, this is not a comprehensive list. There are many counting words ranging from very common to very obscure, some even that day to day Japanese might not always know. There are a couple takeaways from this to be aware of as a language student:

  1. counting words behave like adverbs, which in Japanese means that they immediately precede the verb.
  2. some counting words have pronunciation that varies, in order to make smoother sounds. Some are just not pronounced the way you’d expected. You just have to know these, and memorize them.
  3. It is not necessary to know them all. Knowing the most common ones is a good start, and over time you might learn the obscure ones through experience.

Good luck and happy counting!

1 IIRC, numbers behaved like adjectives, so they would describe “two cows” as duas vaccas, since the adjective “two” must agree in case, number and (grammatical) gender with “cows”. English has very minimal inflection like this, so we just don’t do it. The Sanskrit version, btw, is dvau gavau because it still has a “dual” case between singular and plural. Ancient Greek dropped dual not long after Homeric Greek, I think. Sanskrit is thus a super old language, even compared to Greek/Latin because it retains some truly ancient grammar patterns.

2 Originally from the “Sandhi” rules in Sanskrit. Sanskrit has a complex series of rules for sound-changes, and linguists borrowed the term to describe the same phenomenon in other langauges. Sanskrit has a lot of rules, Japanese has relatively few.

Basic Japanese Particles, Part 2

In our last episode, we talked about some basic, fundamental particles used in the Japanese language. Today, we’ll cover some other, essential particles: “ni” に, “de” で, “yo” よ, and “ne” ね. The first two are often required for parts of speech, but the second two are often used to provide “flavor” or “nuance” to conversation. All of them are frequently used, and necessary to speak Japanese well.

As with the previous post, this post assumes you know how to read hiragana script. If not, now would be a good time to review. Kanji will be kept to a minimum for now.

The targeting particle: に

The particle に (ni) is used in many ways in Japanese, but it’s best to think of it as a particle that provides a target for a verb. Credit goes to Tae Kim for coming up with this explanation.

The に particle is not used for direct objects. As we saw in the last post, the を (wo) particle fulfills that role.

たなかさんにCDをあげた。

I gave Mr Takana the CD

Instead, the に (ni) particle is used when a verb relates to something, but not as a direct objection. A couple examples:

へやにはいる。

To go into a room

also:

でんしゃにおりる。

To get off a train

In both cases, a verb relates to a noun, but it’s not directly doing something to the noun. The に particle simply specifies the targets of the verb. A lot of verbs in Japanese are intransitive verbs, more so than English, so they won’t take direct objects anyway, and in such cases, に is often used.

You can also target time with a verb:

くじにでる。

I will leave at 9 o’clock

One other important note: に is also used in passive speech to designate the agent of the passive action (e.g. “it was done by who”). I still consider this a target, but that’s just me.

たなかさんにすしをたべられた。

The sushi was eaten by Mr Tanaka

The context particle: で

This is another very useful particle. The で (de) particle is used to explain context for things. This includes:

  • Where something took place.
  • Something was done with something.
  • Something will take place within a time frame.

It’s hard to explain, but pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it.

がっこうでごはんをたべた。

I ate lunch (lit. meal) at school

Or:

フライパンでつくった。

[I] cooked with a frypan

Another often overlooked example is:

レゴであそんだ。

[We] played with legos.

And finally for time:

ごふんでつく。

[we will] arrive in five minutes.

The assertive particle: よ

The よ (yo) and ね (ne) particle below are both “nuance” particles. They are not used for parts of speech like many of the particles we’ve seen so far. Instead, these particles are put at the end of sentences to provide nuance to a sentence.

The よ (yo) particle is used to assert something. This is often done to either:

  • Present new information, or
  • Make a point

As with any culture, if you are too assertive, this can annoy other people, but there are many times this is used in Japanese without sounding rude or overly assertive.

Let’s compare these two sentences:

きょうはさむい。

Today is cold.

with:

きょうはさむいよ。

Today is cold.

When translating to English, the meaning is the same. However, the nuance is different. The first sentence is matter of fact, with no nuance. The second sentence assumes that the listener either didn’t know it was cold, or that you are trying to remind the listener that it is cold (therefore you should dress warm).

The soliciting particle: ね

As with the よ (yo) particle, the ね (ne) particle expresses nuance only, but tends to convey something different. Where よ (yo) asserts something, the ね (ne) particle solicits feedback from the listener. This is often used in Japanese language to either solicit agreement from others, but also to downplay one’s opinion (e.g. soften it), thereby making it a bit more polite.

Using the example sentence above, let’s change the nuance a bit:

きょうはさむいね。

Today is cold [don’t you think?].

Here, the speaker is making a point, but doing it in a more solicitous way, hoping to garner agreement with the listener. This is obviously less assertive, and more conciliatory to the listener.

It’s very common to also combine the two to both assert something, but not too strongly:

きょうはさむいよね。

Today is cold [don’t you think?].

You’re still asserting something information, but also pulling back a bit too, so it’s often a happy medium in conversation.

Conclusion

There are a lot more particles in Japanese language, and we haven’t covered all use-cases of these particles either, but even knowing this much gives you a solid foundation, once the usage sinks in. The best way to learn particle usage isn’t memorizing grammar, but instead learning sentence patterns, preferably from real Japanese media (books, TV, etc). Once you’ve seen a sentence pattern 50 times, you can generally get the gist of it. If you’ve seen it 500 times, you probably are pretty familiar with it. 😙

Basic Japanese Particles, Part 1

Japanese, as a language, isn’t really all that hard to learn, especially if you know the Golden Rules, but compared to English, it’s quite different. This means that you have to unlearn English ways of expressing things, and start from the ground-up. A good place to start is to learn the common particles used in Japanese.

I’ve touched on particles before, but in the following two posts, we’ll cover the most common particles in more detail. This post assumes you know how to read hiragana script. If not, now would be a good time to review. I will try to keep kanji to a minimum for now.

Particles in Japanese are small, 1 to 2 syllable markers. There is no direct, one-to-one translation to English, but they’re important for marking parts of speech. This means that you can’t make sense of a sentence in Japanese without knowing particles. Further, you cannot communicate clearly to native speakers without using the correct particles.

For today we’ll focus on “ga” が, “no” の, “wo” を and “desu” です.

When to Use What Particle

Japanese is known for being a “pithy” language, and this is true. Japanese only uses the parts of speech that need to be explicitly mentioned, while the rest is implied by context. English does this too, but not as much. Thus, English speakers of Japanese often sound wordy, and this gets tiring to a native Japanese speaker.

For example if introducing yourself, a common mistake English speakers make is something like this:

わたしのなまえはまつだです。

“Hello, my name is Matsuda”

This isn’t grammatically wrong, just needlessly wordy. Oftentimes, Japanese speakers might simply say:

まつだです。

“[I am] Matsuda.”

Therefore, we’ll try to focus on the most essential, basic particles first. This will be enough to complete basic sentences in most cases.

The noun-linking particle: の

The の “no” particle has several uses, but at its heart, it’s meant to link two nouns together. This can have different nuances depending on context. A common example to just mark possession of something:

まつだのほん

Matsuda’s book

You can pretty much link any two nouns this way:

にほんのじょせい

Japanese women

This also lets you do something called apposition, which means using one noun introduce another:

せんせいのたけださん

Mr (or Miss) Takeda, the teacher

Or time, using なんじ (“what time”?)

なんじのでんしゃ？

What time is the train?

and answer:

さんじのでんしゃ

The 3 O’Clock Train

It has other uses as well, but this covers plenty. The の is super useful, but takes a bit of time to get used to the different nuances.

The subject particle: が

The particle が is one of the most basic and most useful to learn first. Its job is to answer the questions “who”, “what”, “which” or “where”: who does something, which thing is which, where is something?

For example, if the word だれ means “who”, you can ask:

だれがせんせい？

Who’s the teacher?

Which you can answer:

たけだがせんせい。

Takeda is the teacher.

Notice that が is used both to ask “who”, but also answer “who”.

Another example using なに (“what”?)

なにがたべたい？

What do you want to eat?

and the answer:

すしがたべたい

I want to eat sushi

Particle を

The を “wo” particle is interesting because it represents a hiragana letter that no longer is used, and really has only one usage left: marking the direct object of a sentence.

すしをたべる。

I eat sushi

Note that this only works for transitive verbs, verbs that take direct objects. Which verbs are transitive vs intransitive is not always the same as English. You just have to know, and often they come in pairs in Japanese.

The polite particle: です

The particle です is somewhat hard to explain, but in essence, it just makes sentences more polite. You can use it in one of two ways.

One way is to simply append to last noun or adjective, and make it polite:

さむいです。

“It’s cold”

Another way to use it is to replace the last particle + verb, while keeping it polite.

なにがたべたい？

すしがたべたい。
=
すしです。

Conclusion

Particles in Japanese are used in a variety of ways, and nuances, that are hard to translate 1:1 into English, but once you get used to the patterns, it’s not difficult to grasp. The key is to unlearn habits in your home language, and just get used to the basic patterns on their own merits until it becomes second nature.

In part two, we’ll explore more particles and see where we go from there.