Once again Monday is the grammar day. Having reached this far in the Japanese course I'm able to make more complicated noun phrases. "My friend's dog" is an example of a noun phrase. It's a independent unit in a sentence. The topic of the grammar class today was to stress the importance of correct sentence structure. The following structure is very simple, but can grow pretty complex depending on what noun phrases you put into it.
| ________ | が | ________ | を | ________ |
| NP 1 | NP 2 | VP |
が is part of the first noun phrase and is a subject marker. を is part of the second noun phrase and is an object marker. This is a very simple sentence structure, and many sentences follows this pattern. From this you can make many different sentences:
| 猫 | が | ステーキ | を | 食べた |
| NP 1 | NP 2 | VP | ||
| The cat ate steak. | ||||
| 先生の猫 | が | ステーキ | を | 食べた |
| NP 1 | NP 2 | VP | ||
| The teacher's cat ate steak. | ||||
| 私の先生の猫 | が | ステーキ | を | 食べた |
| NP 1 | NP 2 | VP | ||
| My teacher's cat ate steak. | ||||
| あの黒い猫 | が | 私のステーキ | を | 食べた |
| NP 1 | NP 2 | VP | ||
| That black cat ate my steak. | ||||
The possibilities are endless, even though it's a very simple structure it's a useful one. When analyzing sentence structure it's good to draw a tree of the different parts of the sentence and break it down step by step like below.
I hope I've made it more clear now!
Tuesday, Week 7 - Words with "double sounds"
Since yesterday's post was a heavy one I'll make a short one today. Found a funny word in the glossary list today, じろじろ見る (jirojiromiru), which means "to stare (at)". It seems that many words in Japanese have repeating sounds, like もしもし, which means hello but only said through the phone. I also come to think of pluralizing nouns when seeing words with double sounds.
Wednesday, Week 7 - Difference between が and は?
It's not always easy to know when you should use the が or は particle for the subject in the sentence. Take this case to study the difference:
田中さんは東京に行きました。
Use が instead... Here both know that somebody went to Tokyo but B doesn't know who.
田中さんが東京に行きました。
Both sentences means "Tanaka went to Tokyo", but in the first sentence B doesn't know that there was somebody who went to Tokyo. The second sentence stress the fact that it was Robert who went to Tokyo, not someone else. In a way you can say that the use of は introduces something completely new but が only adds information to something already known, in this case that somebody went to Tokyo.
Question words that also is the subject are followed by が and not は.
... and the answer to the question also uses が
Formally は is a topic marker and が is a subject marker. The difference is very small, I sometimes confuse it myself.
Thursday, Week 7 - Kanji with different pronounciations
In Japanese the same kanji can have different pronounciations, quite confusing in the beginning. This is very different from Chinese where all characters have the same pronounciation with only a few exceptions. But in Japanese this is very common. Today I encountered an example of this.
田中 - たなか - Tanaka (common Japanese surname)
The pronounciation of the kanji 中 is marked in red above.
Friday, Week 7 - Confusing kanji again
Today I encountered that a word with the same kanji can have completely different meanings.
| Opposite | |
| 高い | 安い |
| Expensive | Cheap |
| Opposite | |
| 高い | 低い |
| Tall | Short |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
» Monday
» Tuesday
» Wednesday
» Thursday
» Friday
