Japanese language overview: ten sentences

Ten Sentences for you to Understand

One of the methods that worked for me, in the study of Japanese, was understanding and memorizing "master sentences" that contained a gramatical point that was hard for me at the time. I'm going to give you ten sentences that you can hopefully memorize, and then start to turn to your own purposes (replace the subject and object with other words).

"I am American." Or if you like, "I am an American." Adding "jin" (person; you can see that is really a picture of a person sending there) to any country name makes the nationality (e.g., furansu-jin, itaria-jin, roshia-jin for French, Italian and Russian). Putting go after any country name makes the language for that country.

"Keiko is not Chinese. She is Japanese." Note that the subject in the second sentence is omitted since it's obviously Keiko.

"Yesterday, did you go to New York?"

"Please look at my car." Maybe I just bought a new car, and want to show you, but you keep talking about your stupid rose garden. The "yo" is a end-of-sentence particle that adds insistance to the sentence.

"I like interesting people." The subject is assumed to be I, but it's omitted -- if we'd been talking about a guy from Germany named Hans for the last ten minutes, then perhaps we're saying that Hans likes interesting people, but not likely. Omoshiroi is a word that can be "interesting" (as a subject that is challenging to the mind) or "funny" (as a joke). It's quite often, when learning a foreign language, that you have to learn words that don't equal another word -- so you have to learn some context for it.

"I am at the office, but the bag isn't here." A sentence to show you imasu (to be (in a place) for people and animals) and arimasu (to be (in a place) for objects).

"Sachiko's car's tire has gone flat." Here we're chaining no to specify exactly what we're talking about -- the tire on Sachiko's car. Panku suru is a verb that comes from the English word "puncture" meaning "to go flat." Notice suru, to do, is a balls-useful verb that allows many meanings to be communicated, especially with English words. You could express "to jump" by saying janpu suru and everyone would know what you meant.

"Peter bought a TV, and brought it home." Or more literally, "Peter bought a TV, and came here." Using the te form of "to buy" and adding "come" to the end, you can join the two verbs together into a new meaning, "to buy and come home." Many words like "to bring" "to take (a person somewhere)" are created by joining two verbs like this.

"I like trendy music, but I don't like rap." Trendy is an English word that you use gramitically by putting na in between it and the noun. You can use a lot of English words in Japanese words in this way. Note that the 'ga' between the two halves of the sentence is "but" and not the subject marker.

"Do you want to eat Sushi? No, I don't want to eat it." Subjects you and I are omitted. Taberu is "to eat" and in its "I want to" form, it's tabetai.

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