History: Basics

Revision made 7 years ago by Francisco Presencia. Go to the last revision.

Here we learn the basics of Japanese sentences and structures. rYou are assumed to be fluent in Hiragana and Katakana, otherwise please review them thoroughly.

A sentence in Japanese has the subject first, then the object(s) and finally the verb (or omitted for to be). For this English sentence:

I am Francisco.

In Japanese it'd be translated as:

わたしはフランシスコです。

This is the decomposition of that sentence:

  • わたし: the pronoun I
  • は: particle that indicates the preceding is the subject
  • フランシスコ: "Francisco" in katakana
  • です: formal particle in the end; no need for "to be", it is implied.

Pronouns in Japanese are a difficult topic, so we will just be using 私(わたし), "I", and for "you" and "he/she" we will use the name or last name of the person instead.