However, longer and more sophisticated sentences will consist of many words that perform various grammatical roles. The question marker is simply the hiragana character 「か」 and you don’t need to add a question mark. They tell us:Of course, there are many more pieces of information that can be added to a sentence.Let’s start by considering some basic information that relates directly to the action itself, such as:Before we look at how this is done in Japanese, let’s consider how the role of additional information is defined in English.We know that the subject and the object are determined based on word order. The same question words combined with 「でも」 can be used to mean “any”. Japanese particles are small words that indicate relations of words within a sentence. It just has to be kept together as a single block.For example, the destination could be changed from “the library” to “the university library”:Or “my car” could be used as the object, defined by Any noun, no matter where it is used, can be expanded as long as the resulting phrase is a valid noun phrase.Our diagram can therefore be modified to look like this:The different roles in Japanese sentences can be expanded using noun phrasesIn Japanese, noun phrases are used in a lot of different ways, from simple examples like the ones above, to more complex expressions like:The various ways of building different noun phrases and using them in sentences are covered in detail in my book, The most important things to remember about Japanese sentence structure are:The result is that basic sentences usually look like this, with the ‘other information’ appearing optionally and in any order:This basic structure is the foundation of the entire Japanese language. This allows the speaker to talk about the question. Particles are another feature of Japanese grammar that often strike Westerners as unusual or different. For example, you can talk about the question, “What did I eat today?” In the following examples, the question that is being considered is in red.In sentences like example 3 where the question being considered has a yes/no answer, it is common (but not necessary) to attach 「どうか」. What Japanese does have is a class of demonstratives, words like “this” and “that”, which you will learn about very soon.. Also, as I noted in The Topic Marker “Wa”, the wa/ga distinction works in Japanese similarly to the articles a/the. When it comes to the meaning of a sentence, particles are critical.You may have noticed that for English I described Taro as being the Now let’s add another element and try building the following sentence in Japanese:As indicated, we attribute the particles as follows:Using our three basic rules, we can then create our sentence to be any of the following:There are other possible combinations too, and as long as all the pieces of information are followed by the correct particles, they are grammatically correct and have the same fundamental meaning.Again, some orderings are more natural than others. Negative VerbsIt isn’t a sin to be negative. Roughly speaking, "wa" is a topic marker, and "ga" is a subject marker. The topic is often the same as the subject, but not necessary. This is roughly equivalent to saying, “whether or not” in English. Think of particles as “markers” that tell the relationship of a word to the whole sentence. The topic can be anything that a speaker wants to talk about (It can be an object, location or any other grammatical element). Text with the same formatting has the same meaning.What this means is that the sentences, “This is a car”, and, “This is the car”, would both be, This makes things simpler in some ways, but can be hard to get used if you’ve spent your entire life speaking English or similar languages, as not having these words can sometimes make a sentence feel incomplete. A question marker attached to the end of a relative clause makes a mini-question inside a larger sentence. While it is entirely possible to express a question even in polite form using just intonation, the question marker is often attached to the very end of the sentence to indicate a question. The biggest difference between Japanese and English (and many other languages) is how these roles are defined.First, let’s understand what is meant by ‘the role each word plays in a sentence’.In English, for the main elements in a sentence, this role is determined by This sentence has three words: Taro, saw and Noriko. Usually, the basic structure of Japanese sentences is considered to be SOV – subject-object-verb (eg.

There are other ways to specify which car is being talked about, but in many cases, this is implied purely by context. Most people find Japanese sentence structure to be difficult and confusing. In this review, we will go over what we learned in the video, and we will talk about some other uses of these particles. The preposition we use depends on what role we want to attribute to “the library”.The diagram below shows some examples of how prepositions are used to define the relationship between different pieces of information and the action described by the main verb.How different roles are defined in English sentencesWe can usually just add this additional information – together with the appropriate preposition – to the end of the sentence after the object. (The differences between wa and ga will be the topic of a future lesson.). These corner brackets are actually the Japanese quotation marks and they work in a similar but slightly different way from the quotation marks we use in English. For most additional information, however, word order alone is not enough – we need prepositions like “in”, “on”, “at”, “to” and “from”.For example, we can’t just say “Taro saw Noriko the library”. Instead of trying to fit a Japanese-shaped peg into an English-shaped hole, let’s start again.For example, a basic sentence might have a topic (which is often the same as the subject) followed by the particle ‘wa’, then an object with the particle ‘wo’, and finally the verb.