Moonlight_Huang hou

How is a sentence set up? Such as: I like to eat dinner early. How would you set that sentence up in japanese sentence? such as are verbs first? or something like that? ^^'

mystical shadow angel

well...let's put it this way. japanese sentence structures are almost the opposite of english sentence structures. eg - 'onamae wa' and 'what is your name' mean the same thing. but if you actually translate the exact words, the 'name' is the 1st word in the japanese way of asking what is your name (namae means name) and not the last word.

...confusing o_O

__________________

JEEB

I'd say that Japanese hasn't got a strict sentence structure (or I might just feel like that because it's a quite topic-prominent language), but usually the word order comes like this: subject->object->verb. The basic sentence structure is usually topic->comment.

"Watashi wa takoyaki ga suki desu" would be translated like: "As for me, I like takoyaki." The 'watashi' is me, 'wa' is a topic particle (read: the 'wa' decides the topic), the 'ga' is a particle that determines the subject and the 'desu' is the verb 'to be' (suki means 'to like' or 'like', but it hasn't got the verb'ish substance as in English and can't be called a verb as such - it's more "like an adjective").

If you need more information, there's a good text written in the Wikipedia about Japanese language sentence structure (clicky).

__________________

Moonlight_Huang hou

THanks JEEB and Mystic Shadow Angel ^__^ That helps me....

jeilee

wow JEEB you are really good in japanese !
are you a japanese????
it's really cool because i like japanese culture!!!hehehe
anyway your really cool

Twitchy

Yeah JEEB got the sentance structure down flat

__________________

thanks shonen

JEEB

@Moonlight
No problem, it's fun to try to put something you know into words, something concrete.

@jeilee
No, I'm not Japanese . It's true that I've been in Japan for a year and that got my Japanese a lot better but it still doesn't make me Japanese. I've been thinking about being a Japanese teacher in my local high school as it has a sortage of courses about it and many people are eager to join more classes (and it's a way to earn money). Heh... It's only been about two years from the time when I took that course myself. Learning hiragana and katakana (^_^)/

@non-offtopic:
In any case I'd say that Wikipedia has matured a bit on the side of languages. For basic information I'd say that it's one of the best places to look. I was planning on making a somehow-understandable book on Japanese, but I'll leave that until I get through the Nihongo nouryoku shiken on level 1 (-_o)

__________________

blue_rebel

"onamae ha" >> "your name is...?"

A longer sentence for that would probably go like : "Anata no namae ha nandesu ka?" (Direct translation : Your name is what?) But so as not to waste breath, we use the former. I must admit that the Japanese sentence structure is a little confusing at times, but I got me a pretty good handbook on that. Forgot what it's called. It's dark red and... oh, I'll go look for it. ^^;; But it's the same as picking up any other language. You just need to converse more and more to get the feel of it. Often sentence structures can't really be explained...

mystical shadow angel

onamae ha? ...ah i know where you got that from. in japanese, the 'ha' symbol is pronounced as a 'wa' when used as a particle. so...it's 'onamae wa' and not 'onamae ha'. you would pronounce the 'ha' symbol as 'ha' when it's used in an actual word or name (eg - hamasaki). but if it's used as a particle (by itself) then it's pronounced 'wa'.

kind of confusing...when i first learnt that, i was like o_O but after studying japanese for 3 years, i'm used to it now ^_^

__________________

blue_rebel

Er, I know that. But I still spell it as "ha" anyway.

faia

like if you ask someone are you an american? it's set up like anata wa amerkia-jin desu ka..........which if its translated directly is:you an american are?