How to say something in Japanese

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 possessed by me).
えんぴつ -> means "pencil".
です -> is a pseudo-verb that means "to be" (used in polite sentences).

I know it doesn't sound simple at first look, but believe me: it is. Read this post and do some research on the Internet about the subjects I talked about and, in some days, you will be familiarized with all these concepts.