Things about Japanese

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...

In my constant online research on good materials to learn Japanese, I have found some really great stuff. Unfortunately, one of the texts is not in English. It's a book written in Portuguese, by Brazilian professor Luiz Rafael Passari. It's named "Desvendando a Língua Japonesa". It is REALLY GREAT for a beginner, since its concepts and examples are simple. It's useful, though not very extensive. You can download this book on his website: https://programajaponesonline.com.br/ (It requires a registration). The second one is a book by Tae Kim. Well, it's simply the best available Japanese grammar book. It's really complete, and of course complex. It really teaches you how to speak Japanese in a formal and informal way. It is available in this link: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/grammar_guide.pdf The third one is a guide to learn Kanji. Kanji is the set of Chinese characters that were exported to Japanese. They are complex and some people really have di...

Well, I started being fascinated about languages on 2010. Before that, I always had been an excellent English student (although I had learned about 90% of what I know today by music and on the Internet). Of the idioms I like the most, I'd highlight English, Japanese and German. I also have interest on all the romanian languages (like Spanish, French and Italian), along with some exotic tongues like Georgian and Finnish. I decided, after planning a couple of time, to create a blog on Japanese. With it, I want, more than help myself learning it, help other people, answering their questions and showing good grammar examples. So, I think that's it. I hope you all enjoy the material.