Basic Sentences
Here you'll learn how to put some basic Japanese sentences together.
Before going further with this small lesson, it is highly recommended that you are somewhat familiar with the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana charts. You don't necessarily need to know ALL the characters on both charts by heart for this lesson, but it really helps if you know at least a few from each chart. One more thing — if you don't yet know the difference between Hiragana and Katakana, take a quick minute to learn now!
Using the simple sentence structure shown above, you can pretty much say "anything" is "anything" in Japanese.
Of course without knowing too much vocabulary, its a little tough to say exactly what you want to say so we'll start with an easy example using the words "cat" and "red".
- The Japanese word for "cat" is ねこ (ne-ko)
- The Japanese word for "red" is あかい (a-ka-i)
So, if we wanted to say "The cat is red," we would say:
- ねこは あかいです。(ne-ko wa a-ka-i de-su.)
You may have noticed in the examples above that we use the Hiragana は (ha) but pronounce it "wa". In the sentence — ねこは あかいです。 — the は is considered a "particle" and in some cases, particles are pronounced a little differently. More on particles later, but if curiosity is getting the best of you, click here to learn more about them now.
Turning the sentence into a question using か
Now that we know how to say the cat is red, turning it into a question is as simple as adding か to the end:
- ねこは あかいですか。(ne-ko wa a-ka-i de-su-ka.)
Is the cat red?
Awesome! You're starting to get the hang of this stuff! Now wouldn't you like to know exactly how this sentence was put together? If so, you're ready for your first lesson in Japanese grammar!