Speaking Japanese - Intonation

Japanese Grammer Rules

Basic Sentence Structure

In Japanese writing, verbs, nouns, and particles, are the most important aspect of a sentence.

Having a reference to Japanese verbs, and Japanese particles is necessary, as almost every Japanese sentence uses them.

Most sentences are written with hiragana and kanji in Japanese. Some use katakana, when there is no hiragana or kanji for a word. Complex sentences can have many nouns/pronouns and verbs/adverbs, adjectives, and one or more particles.

Kanji Characters

It will give you the letters for the sentence's noun, verb, pronoun, and particle(s) individually, so you can recognize each word in the sentence, and also you can see how verb, noun, particle are placed in the sentence. This is a very useful tool, especially when first learning to write Japanese.

When doing your word and sentence searches at this website, you will see ON (onyomi) and kun (kunyomi). These mean chinese(ON) and Japanese(KUN) letters. If Kanji is available use that first as your letters, and if not, then use one of the others - onyomi or kunyomi letters.

You can also paste a KANJI ideographic (character symbol) into the Kanji dictionary, and it will tell you the meaning of that particular kanji symbol, and also variations of it- including the written letters for the Kanji word.

English to Japanese For A Japanese Sentence

I eat chicken.

Firstly, we placed the English words 'I eat chicken' into the Bing, Japanese translator(free), and got the Japanese letters.
You can also listen to the 'audio pronunication of the sentence', just click the audio icon.

私は鶏を食べる

Next, we placed those Japanese letters into this Japanese sentence translator(free), and clicked Translate Now.

Now, we can see the Japanese sentence (and words) for our sentence (I eat chicken)
watashi wa niwatori o taberu

Then, we hovered our mouse over the sentence to see the Japanese sentence details. Clicking on each word, shows additional info on it. See Example: for the word, 'chicken', its a noun, and spelled, 'niwatori'

view here

And,

鶏
if we click on the 'Kanji details', we get more info on the Kanji for the word chicken: See Example:
Kanji details for word chicken it shows the characters(aka ideographic) for Kanji for word chicken, also shows spelling, niwatori(KUN)Japanese.

Additionally, if you click on 'radical', you will see more Kanji characters, pertaining to word 'chicken'. See Example here Kanji radical - word chicken

If you wanted to write the word chicken with Chinese letters, you would use the letters next to ON(onyomi-Chinese) . However, for our sentence we are going to use the

Kanji Japanese characters 鶏 chicken




The translator shows us the letters individually as words,(underlined).


The word I(watashi) using Kanji, is 私, and has two letters. The verb eat(taberu), also using Kanji and, Hiragana is食べる; it has three letters. The word chicken(niwatori), also Kanji, is 鶏 two letters. Kanji characters (ideographic) are unique because many of them look like a symbol more than a letter or letters.

We now know all the words in our sentence are written mostly in Kanji, with some Hiragana,(the verb ending-taberu-the be and ru).
To gather more info about the sentence particles we viewed our list of particles here. It will explain when to use and where to place each particle within a sentence. は wa, is a particle placed with the sentence topic or subject, and を wo, pronounced o, is a particle placed with the sentence verb.


Now we have the letters to write our sentence; we know the individual words, what particles to use; and we know how to pronounce them.

Lastly, we will practice writing our letters. 私は鶏を食べる

watashi wa niwatori o taberu

(I eat chicken)

Most sentences will have kanji and hiragana letters, or kanji and katakana letters, or kanji with hiragana, and katakana.

There are several websites online where you can practice 'handwriting'. These are useful to practice your hiragana and katakana letters, and kanji character sets. Evernote is one such website, and their android free app lets you add 'handwriting' to your notes.

Let's Look at Our Example Sentence

Japanese Writing Tips

You will know it is a 'long vowel' because there will be 2 or more vowels within the word as shown in these example words- keeki and hanbaagaa.
The word keeki has two e vowels, and hanbaagaa has two a vowels twice in the spelling, so when writing the letters for these words, you just add the - where the additional vowels are; as shown here.

ケーキ
cake - keeki (noun)

ハンバーガー
hamburger hanbaagaa (noun)

Particles

In Japanese, particles are used to give meaning to your sentence composition. The Japanese language has almost 200 particles(View all), and although they are all used in sentences, some are used more often, making them easier to learn - like wa, wo(o), ga, ni, to, yori, kurai, shi, koso, dake, nomi, nari, ka, to name a few. As there are no spaces in Japanese writing, knowing your particles can help to find the individual words within a sentence.

Lets look again at our example sentence - 'I eat chicken', in Japanese writing, and find the particles.

The particles for this sentence are in green color. Now we know what words are before and after our particles.

私は鶏を食べる



Watashi wa niwatori o taberu

は particle wa
を particle wo pronounced o

は particle is placed after the Topic or Subject of your sentence, and your Topic/Subject is commonly the first word of your sentence.

を particle is placed before your verb in a sentence. You can have more than one in a sentence depending on how many verbs are in your sentence.
So, for this simple sentence, we placed our は particle after the word I (watashi- subject of sentence), and
we placed our を particle before the sentence verb (eat -taberu,verb of sentence), written as wo or just o.


Verbs in Japanese Writing

Verbs are placed at the end of sentences when writing Japanese. If the sentence is a question, then ka (particle) is at the end of the sentence and the verb is usually placed before it.

And, verbs don't change to a plural form when the sentence 'subject' (noun/pronoun) changes to plural form. Take this example; 'I eat chicken', uses taberu (verb), and 'they eat chicken', also uses the same verb, taberu.
The sentence 'subject' -I(watashi)(pronoun) is single. The sentence 'subject' they (kanojora)(pronoun) is plural.

i eat chicken
Written as:

私は鶏を食べる
watashi wa niwatori o taberu

they eat chicken
彼女は鶏を 食べる
kanojora wa niwatori o taberu

ALSO READ: Forming Japanese Sentences
For: constructing a Japanese sentence - with verb tenses, and how to use particles.


To Master Japanese Writing

To master Japanese writing you must first become skilled at Japanese Hiragana; one of three Japanese alphabets.

When learning to write Japanese, first learn Hiragana alphabet letters; they include the single letters, as well as two letter, and three letters together. View them here, chart of hiragana Japanese letters and, view some common English words written in hiragana here Knowing how to write hiragana letters is essential to be able to write Japanese words, particles, nouns; and to decipher Japanese sentences.

In Japanese writing, particles define the purpose and function of words in a sentence. Learn the meaning of each and where to place them in a sentence; especially the more common particles like: wa, wo(o), ka, ga, no, ni, ne, ya, mo, de, yori, kara, to, nari, noni, yara, koso, yo, dake. View a list of Japanese particles here. and, how to use particles in sentences, and for some example sentences with particles gohere

Verbs form the basis for sentence structure and meaning in Japanese writing. They can be formal, informal, present tense or past tense. View 'how to conjugate verbs to past tense informal'. Study a 'verb list', for Japanese verbs; to learn the more common present tense verbs. View a Japanese present tense verb list here Studying the present tense verbs is actually easy, because they most end with u, ru, ku, mu, su.

Learn all the verb tense conjugation rules for Japanese. Verbs are written differently for present and past tenses.

First learn the informal present tense and informal past tense of common verbs, then continue with formal present tense and formal past tense. Knowing the hiragana alphabet letters, together with some common verbs (past/present tenses), and some particles; is sufficient for you to start writing words and simple sentences in Japanese.

Most words and sentences can be written using hiragana, so practice writing hiragana letters first as they are the easiest to learn. Write words and simple sentences to become skilled at hiragana writing. To master hiragana, you should be able to write the letters, combination letters, and be able to find them easily in Japanese words and sentences. For speaking Japanese, you should learn how to pronounce each of the letters as well.

Use an online English to Japanese translator to do word searches for Japanese words, and use them to practice writing your hiragana letters.

Additionally, you can learn some Katakana Japanese alphabet letters(characters).
View Chart of Katakana Letters here Katakana alphabet letters are spelled/written differently than Hiragana, however, they are pronounced the same and they mean the same. Therefore, Hiragana and Katakana can both be used when writing a word.
Each alphabet has 46 letters, and some combination letters. Katakana has additional letters that Hiragana does not have. There are about 25 of them as shown here.

For Hiragana Chart GoHere

As with Hiragana, you need to learn to write the letters(characters) of Katakana and know how to pronounce each of them as well.

Learn To write Hiragana letters here; and, Learn To write Katakana letters; gohere

Finally, you will want to learn some Kanji. Kanji is also one of the three Japanese alphabets, and, the most difficult to learn. Kanji is taught in schools in Japan, with students learning about 2000 of them. Kanji characters are also known as 'ideographs'.
Each Kanji character is written using a specific stroke order and each has a specific number of strokes, known as 'stroke count'.

Kanji is also categorized by simple to more difficult Kanji based on the 'stroke count'. This Japanese website has Kanji lessons 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. ; five being the easiest to learn, and with 'less strokes' than the more difficult Kanji.

You can also research Kanji words using online Kanji dictionaries, like the ones at these websites: romajidesu and, tangorin Just use an English word to get spelling and meaning in Japanese.

Hiragana and katakana - the Japanese alphabets; can be self taught in a reasonable amount of time. How often you practice writing them will ultimately determine your comprehension level and time it takes for you to become sufficiently skilled. Japanese particles, together with common word verbs and nouns can also be learned rather easily. As Kanji is more difficult to learn, you can start with easy Kanji (less strokes). View some easy Kanji words here

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