With pronunciation under our belt, let's now take a quick look at the structure of Japanese words and sentences. You'll find that the pronunciation you've just gone through will be very helpful in going through this part of the course, especially when it comes to understanding the way words are spelled, formed, and sounded.

Japanese words are in most cases a combination of the sounds created by the syllables, and are thus sounded out as such. For example, "watashi" (meaning "I") is a combination of (no surprise) "wa", "ta", and "shi" and is pronounced as the combination of the single syllabic sounds ("wah-tah-shee"). Having a consistent way of sounding out words makes it very easy to break down a Japanese word written with English letters and be able to guess at pronouncing it.

Some examples:

abunai ("look out") - a-bu-nai, "ah-boo-nah-ee"
osakini ("pardon my going first") - o-sa-ki-ni, "oh-sah-kee-nee"
ikimasu ("going") - i-ki-ma-su, "ee-kee-mah-soo"

When learning Japanese, the meanings of words are not going to be blatantly obvious, as they may be when seeing words in other languages that may look like English. This places an emphasis on learning your vocabluary. While you may come away from this course with a few bits and pieces, it is only in looking up conversational situations as well as frequent practice that will give you the tools you need to discern what a Japanese word means and how it is pronounced.

Let's take a look at sentence structure. We won't go over it in detail, mostly because the Japanese sentence structure is just as complicated as the English sentence structure, and requires some extensive study to really get down all the nuances (this is why teachers in school spend so much time on "boring" grammar for your native language - because otherwise it gets damn confusing). For the purposes of this course, it is sufficient to note some general things.

Japanese sentences follow a structure of SOV (subject-object-verb). This is a contrast to English sentence structure, which follows SVO (subject-verb-object). So for example, in an English sentence:

Frank (S) gave (V) Rachel (indirect obj.) the credit card (O). (SVO)

But in Japanese, it would look like:

Frank (S) Rachel (indirect obj.) the credit card (O) gave (V). (SOV)

If you want the actual Japanese sentence, it would be something like:

"Frank-san ga Rachel-san ni kurekitto kaado o ageta."

Without knowing what word means what, can you see which words are the subject, object, and verb? Bet you can.

While there are particles to indicate subjects and objects, as well as connect nouns, remembering that all Japanese sentences follow this structure will ensure that you don't mess up when saying something and forgetting the word order (I had a tough time forcing myself to put the Japanese verbs at the end of the sentence when saying them at first, because I was so used to putting them after the subjects in English sentences).

One particle we should go over is "ka", which basically is added to the end of a sentence in order to designate a question (along with a question word like "who", "what", etc.). So, taking another example sentence:

"Dare ga kurekitta kaado o agemasu ka?"

We see that "ka" has been added, with "dare" (who) to indicate a question - "Who will give the credit card?"

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of Japanese sentence structure, but it does give you an idea of how they are formed. Now let's try to apply some of the material we've learned into figuring out Japanese conversation.

>>Go to Lesson 4 - Talking Japanese: Conversation