Things about Japanese

Primary colors Yellow - 黄色 (きいろ) Blue - 青 (あお) Red - 赤 (あか) White - 白 (しろ) Black - 黒 (くろ)

With colors 白い船が遠くに見えた (I saw a white ship far away) - where: 白 (しろ) - white い - since 白 is an い adjective, it uses い to connect to a substantive 船 (ふね) - boat; ship が - subject particle 遠 (とお) く - gives the idea of "far away"; distant 見 (み) えた - past form of  見える, means "could see"; "be capable of see"

Many things make Japanese a unique language. One of those things is that it has particles. Particles are elements that show us the function of the words in a sentence. It may sound strange at first glance (I'm assuming you didn't know about it), but it will become easier the more you understand it, I swear. の The first particle I will teach you is the one that I think is the easiest. It is the particle の (it reads "no"). This particle has the function of show that something belongs to someone. It represents possession. For example: 私のえんぴつ - where: 私 (わたし) - I の - possession particle えんぴつ - pencil So, it means that the pencil belongs to me. Easy, isn't it? と Let's try another particle. It will be と (it reads "to"). It has the same function of "and" in English. So: 本とノート - where: 本 - book と - addition particle ノート - notebook It obviously means "book and notebook". や Let's try another one? It wil...

It's very simple to convert an affirmative sentence to negative and past forms. I will first teach you the negative form . Take this sentence: あれはがっこう, that means "that is a school". We can say that "that isn't a school" by attaching じやない (most used in speech) or ではない (most used in writing) at the end of the sentence. So it will become: - あれはがっこうじやない - あれはがっこうではない Note:  remember that we can attach です at the end of the sentences showed above, in order to make them sound polite. But there's another way to make the negative sentence sound even more polite than attaching です at the end of it. It is by say: - じやありません - ではありません So, that's it. These are the ways to pass a sentence to the negative form (there are another forms, but they are rarely used. You can find them in a quick research). Now, I'll talk about the past forms . In my previous post, I talked about です and だ. So, we can put the sentence in the past form this way: - です turn...

If you are reading this post, I assume you learned hiragana and katakana. That's the reason there is no romaji here. Most grammar books start presenting the characters これ, それ and あれ, that mean "this" (the first two ones) and "that" (the last one). Simple Japanese phrases usually don't need a verb to say "to be", but you can attach だ in the end of a sentence to give emphasis to the affirmation, or です, to make it sound polite. I will talk about Japanese particles in another post, but now I want you to learn the most simple one, that is は (written ha, but read wa, God only knows why) and の. Knowing all this information, we can build some simple sentences, just like: これは私のえんぴつです in which: これ -> means "this". は -> is a particle that indicates whom we are talking about. 私 -> is a kanji, that is read わたし, and means "I". の -> is a particle that indicates possession (in this case, that "pencil" is pos...

Well, the first thing you have to know about Japanese is that it's not a simple language at all. It works differently from any other language you may know. It's complex and demands so much time to proper master it. So, if you are looking for a tongue that you could learn rapidly, please don't choose Japanese. Instead, go learn Spanish or Italian. So, knowing that, you are able to learn some basic things about this language. The first one is that Japanese uses 3 different alphabets, that are used mixed in daily speech. They are: * Hiragana: the most simple alphabet of the language. It consists of 46 characters, that includes all the natural Japanese sounds (there are more, possible with katakana, that I will explain later in this post). The symbols are: I will later (in another post) explain a simple way to learn all these symbols (believe me, it's easy). * Katakana: another alphabet, that usually represents foreigner words.  * Kanji: this, besid...