¤ Beginner Lesson: Forming Simple Sentences ¤

mteric

Here is a quick lesson on how to form simple sentences in Japanese.  Let me know if this is useful!  (Note: this lesson assumes you know Hiragana and Katakana.  If you don't know these characters yet, check out this thread for more information.)

Consider the following sentence in English:

He is a teacher.

The word order is Subject - Verb - Object; where "he" is the subject, "is" is the verb, and "a teacher" is the object.

In Japanese, the word order is different; the verb is placed at the end: Subject - Object - Verb.  Using the same example:

彼は先生です。

彼（かれ） = he
先生（せんせい） = teacher
です = is

Note the は after 彼.  This is a topic marker.  It is basically used to indicate that whatever is before the marker is going to be the topic (or subject) of the sentence.  In our example, we marked "he" as being the topic.

Another example:

私はアメリカ人です。

私（わたし） = I
アメリカ人（アメリカじん）= American
です = am

That's not so bad, is it?  Things get more interesting when you add adjectives, adverbs, etc., but we'll talk about that in another lesson.