Ladies and Gents, an announcement. I am currently reeeally busy with studies, due to having slacked off a bit too much and because I simply CANNOT get myself motivated when studying alone. So in an effort to further motivate myself into really sticking to it, I’m gonna make these little posts on my blog to teach other people Japanese. This has two purposes really:

a) I get back to basics, find the motivation I need, and will be able to prepare myself for the upcoming JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) I’m taking in three weeks.
b) I will be able to update my blog regularly even while studying. Otherwise, I’d have to desert this place until like… February.

Don’t expect to get earth-shattering Japanese speaking skillz from this though, the things I’ll cover are essentially stuff you’d learn during preparatory year of a university, which roughly equals the first three years of elementary school in Japan (not even…). Some of the stuff will only be covered briefly, but if you have any questions about something in any given lesson, write a question in the comment and I’ll try to answer if I can.

It should be noted that I used the “Genki I” and “Genki II” books while studying in my prepatory year, so odds are that the stuff I talk about will have the same terminology and be quite similar to the books. I can strongly recommend the Genki books for self-study, since I found them quite useful myself. However, if you are a complete rookie at Japanese or you only want to learn specific phrases or whatnot, I would probably recommend “Japanese for Busy People” or even Lonely Planet’s phrasebook titled simply “Japanese“. The latter is excellent for travels, as it includes commonly used phrases, cultural tips/pointers, and a culinary dictionary.

If I find the time, I will use visual aids such as .gifs, flash animations, or other stuff, to make things easier for either me (reduce the amount of writing) or you (improve understanding). Also, I will frequently be using kana and kanji (if you don’t know what these things are, don’t worry, they’ll be explained in the next lesson) in my examples, so make sure your browser can view them. If you can see the following properly: これは日本語のフォントです, then you’re safe. If all you saw was a bunch of ‘????’, you’re screwed. Okay, not really, you just have to change the font setting in your browser, which is an easy fix. In your browser’s top menu, go to “show“, “font” and change it to “Unicode” (I think it is), that should fix most problems. If it doesn’t, you could be missing the Asian language pack, which can be downloaded for free on the Internet, so google it ^_^

Anywho, looking forward to trying this out, so keep your eyes peeled for more stuff soon. またね! (n_n)/

NB! Lots of boring text bellow, if you wanna go straight to learning, go to the flash animation at bottom of this post and read the tutorial on how to use it.

Before learning Japanese, it is generally expected that you are able to read and write kana. Kana (仮名) is the common term for the syllibary systems used in Japan, which are used alongside Chinese characters, called kanji in Japanese. There are essentially five four types of kana; man’yōgana, hentaigana, katakana, and hiragana, however, only the latter two is still commonly in use today, which is why those are the ones you will learn.

History

I’m gonna keep this section as short as possible, because it ain’t all that interesting and because memory fails me… But during the Heian period of Japan (I think it was), which was 794-1185 CE, Chinese was the language of the scholared and the kana used for writing was the man’yōgana, which was relatively complex Chinese characters. The cursive form, which was used by women, of certain man’yōgana later evolved into the simplified kana to be known as hiragana (see evolution chart here), while the shorthand form, used by men, of certain man’yōgana evolved into katakana (se evolution chart here). While these new kana were not favored by scholars, who still considered Chinese to be “the proper spoken and written language of the scholared“, it lead to a revolution of new authors and poets among nobility, especially among women, who before were not able to read or write because they couldn’t/weren’t allow to become scholars.

Usage

The usage of hiragana and katakana is essentially very simple, though with some odd exceptions. As a rule of thumb however, just remember it like this: katakana is used when writing loanwords (words taken directly from other languages, e.g. アイスクリーム (aisukurīmu) is taken from the English word “ice cream“) or foreign names, while hiragana is used for verb and adjective inflections, for particles, and for any word not written in kanji. The division of hiragana being a “female script” and katakana being a “male script” can still be seen in children. Children who can’t, or won’t, write their names using kanji will obviously then write them using kana. Girls often favor hiragana, because it is curvier, prettier, and therefore more feminie, while boys will often go for katakana, since the straight lines look more direct, cool, and masculine (or at least “not feminine”).

Learning part

And now we finally get to the part you’ve all probably been waiting for. I’m not gonna write so much here, since everything is explained in the in-flash tutorial. Use the left and right buttons at the bottom of the tutorial to read the previous or next page, respectively. However, a few things to note that are not explicitly explained in the flash:

•Small tsu: When reading and you encounter a tsu that looks smaller than a regular tsu (compare: つっ and ツッ) it means that the next consonant is doubled! E.g. みっか (mikka), まっつ (mattsu), エッジ (ejji), etc. The only exception is with double “n”s, which instead of a small tsu use the standalone “n” (ん), e.g. みんな (minna). Pronounciation-wise, you simple “hold” the consonant sound for ½~1 second.

•Bar: The bar looks like a hyphen (ー) and is unique to katakana, except sometimes when used in onomatopoeia (words to describe sounds, like “woosh”, “crack”, “whomp”, etc.) in manga. It is used to elongate the preceding vowel, so pronounciation-wise, hold the vowel sound twice as long as you regularly would. It is romanized by repeating the vowel, e.g. ビール (biiru), ショー (shoo), etc.

•Other small kana: Any small kana, that isn’t a tsu, is used to combine sounds and thus change the reading. In 95% of cases, these will be either ya, yu, or yo. In the flash, you’ll notice them on the left most table, and a single row on the right. Example: compare しょ (sho) to しよ (shiyo) or にや (niya) to にゃ (nya). It is important to take notice of this, because the meaning of a word can change dramatically, e.g. びよういん (biyouin = beauty parlor) vs びょういん (byouin = hospital). In the case of katakana, a, i, e, and o can also be small (see the green boxes at the top, when viewing katakana in the flash).

•Dakuten/Handakuten: In the flash, in the right most table, you’ll notice that the reading of a kana is slightly different. This is because of the two lines, called dakuten, or just ten-ten (dot-dot), added to the top right of the kana. The round circle seen in P-row is called handakuten or simply maru (circle). To compare, see はばぱ (ha-ba-pa, respectively).

The flash-animation

If you have any comments or questions about the flash or the lesson, feel free to ask. If you wish to download the flash to your computer, right-click this link and select “Save destination as…” (the animation can be opened in just about any web-browser that supports flash, so IE or FF will work just fine). To open the file in a browser, right-click it, then press “Open with…” and select the browser of your choice. Also, if you notice anything I haven’t properly covered about kana, feel free to drop me a note.

I assume that you have now either memorized or in the process of memorizing all the kana from the last lesson, since we will be using some of them in this lesson. Please note that, like I stated in the introduction post, I used the Genki books while learning basic Japanese and will therefore mostly stick to Genki terminology, unless I can think of a better explanation. I will try to make mention any alternative names for terms, should I know them. That being said, let us look into verbs in Japanese! :3

Placement in a sentence

The Japanese language follows a SOV-pattern, SOV being short for “Subject, Object, Verb“, meaning that the verb of a sentence will always be at the end. So a good rule of thumb about Japanese is, that if you are in doubt about what a sentence is about, look at the last word. The overall meaning of a sentence is decided by how a verb is conjugated, but we will look into that gradually with each lesson, as this would be too much to take in all at once. Instead, lets look at the three groups of verbs that exist in Japanese.

ru verbs

Ru verbs are also called group 2 verbs, vowel stem verbs, and ichidan verbs. Genki teaches that ru verbs are verbs that simply end in ru, and then makes a footnote of the exception rule. However, here is a better trick; look at the vowel preceding the final ru. If the vowel is an ‘a’, ‘u’, or ‘o’, it is not a ru verb, but a u verb (see next section). If the preceding vowel is an ‘i’ or an ‘e’, there’s a 95% chance that it is a ru verb. The last 5% are u verbs that break this rule of thumb, and one simply has to memorize which ones they are (there are about 100-150 of these verbs).

Examples

A few examples to better help understand the above ‘rant’.

ru verbs
•taberu = to eat
•nigeru = to flee
•okiru = to wake up

exceptions (u verbs ending in -iru/-eru)
•suberu = to slip
•shaberu = to chat
•kujiru = to strangle

u verbs (otherwise ending with ‘ru’)
•hikaru = to shine
•tsukuru = to make
•ogoru = to treat (someone to a meal)

u verbs

u verbs are also called group 1 verbs, consonant stem verbs, and godan verbs. U verbs are quite simply any verbs that are not ru verbs. Like the name suggests, and which you have probably inferred by now, is that all verbs in dictionary form (the form you use when you look it up in the dictionary, duh) end with the vowel ‘u’.

Examples

•kau = to buy
•hanasu = to talk
•kaku = to write
•matsu = to wait
•shinu = to die
•nomu = to drink

The lack of a verb ending in ‘yu’ is quite simply because I’ve never encountered one, so I don’t even know if such a verb exists… I strongly doubt they do, since they’d be impossible to conjugate. Anywho, the only ‘problem’ is when to know whether a verb ending in ‘ru’ is a ‘ru verb’ or a ‘u verb’, however, the method for doing this was explained in the above ‘ru verb’-section.

Irregular verbs

There are two irregular verbs in the Japanese language: ’suru’ (to do) and ‘kuru’ (to come). They are irregular in the sense of how they are conjugated, which we’ll look into in the next lesson, for now just keep in mind that they are irregular. Suru can be attached to nouns in order to turn them into verbs, for instance そつぎょう (卒業 sotsugyou) means ‘graduation’, while そつぎょうする (卒業する sotsugyousuru) means ‘to graduate’.

And that concludes this lesson. If you have any questions in case any of this is confusing to you, feel free to ask in a comment, and I’ll answer ASAP.

Today, we’ll be dealing with something relatively simple, in the sense that if you understood the last lesson, you should have this down pretty quickly since its just a case of remembering the proper pattern.

For the time being, I will only teach you the long form, which you can consider the ‘default’ form for when speaking with strangers (it’s a matter of respect, since all forms have their own ‘respect levels’, where the long form is considered neutral). It goes under many other names as well, but my personal favourite alternative is desu/-masu form, since it tells about the sentence construction, i.e. the sentence will either end in a verb in the -masu form or with the copula ‘desu’. Also, for future reference, please note that the part of the verb that goes before the -masu is called the verb base (or sometimes “verb stem”). Anywho, on to verb conjugation!

A bit about ‘desu’

A very quick note about desu. Desu is classified as a copula, which is also called a linking verb. Because of this, like with regular verbs, it is always in the end of a sentence, and is used whenever the sentence would otherwise end with e.g. an adjective. For instance, in proper long form, if you wanted to say “I am cute” (which is probably the most infamous Japanese sentence on the web), ‘cute’ being an adjective and not a verb, you would say “watashi wa kawaii desu“. Now, on to verb conjugation, for real!

-masu conjugation…

Please note that the Japanese do not have a strict present/future tense, but rather use the same tense for both. As such, tenses are called “past tense” and “non-past tense”, though many will still refer to the latter as “present tense” (I slip up with this as well), even the books teaching Japanese. If you want to emphasize whether you are talking about present or future, you would usually add a time reference, e.g. “tomorrow”. Anywho, here’s a list of basic conjugation (examples below):

non-past affirmative = -masu
non-past negative = -masen
past affirmative = -mashita
past negative = -masen deshita

…of ru verbs

When conjugating ru verbs, simply remove ru and add -masu. Example with たべる (taberu, to eat).

non-past affirmative = たべます (tabemasu, I eat)
non-past negative = たべません (tabemasen, I don’t eat)
past affirmative = たべました (tabemashita, I ate)
past negative = たべませんでした (tabemasen deshita, I didn’t eat)

…of u verbs

When conjugating u verbs, simply remove u and add -imasu. Examples with のむ (nomu, to drink) and いく (iku, to go).

non-past affirmative = のみます (nomimasu, I drink)
non-past negative = のみません (nomimasen, I don’t drink)
past affirmative = のみました (nomimashita, I drank)
past negative = のみませんでした (nomimasen deshita, I didn’t drink)

non-past affirmative = いきます (ikimasu, I go)
non-past negative = いきません (ikimasen, I don’t go)
past affirmative = いきました (ikimashita, I went)
past negative = いきませんでした (ikimasen deshita, I didn’t go)

An important thing to note here, is that verbs ending in su change to shi and that verbs ending in tsu change to chi. For instance, hanasu (to speak) becomes hanashimasu and matsu (to wait) becomes machimasu. Other than that, they follow the same procedure.

…of irregular verbs

Here is why suru (to be) and kuru (to come) are considered irregular, because when you conjugate them, the entire verb changes, so they technically have no verb base. This is most likely due to their property of turning nouns in to verbs (see last lesson), making the noun itself the verb base. Anywho, examples:

non-past affirmative = します (shimasu, I do)
non-past negative = しみません (shimasen, I don’t do)
past affirmative = しみました (shimashita, I did)
past negative = しみませんでした (shimasen deshita, I didn’t do)

non-past affirmative = きます (kimasu, I come)
non-past negative = きません (kimasen, I don’t come)
past affirmative = きました (kimashita, I came)
past negative = きませんでした (kimasen deshita, I didn’t come)

And get your mind out of the gutter…

Desu conjugation

For sake of simplicity, I’m not gonna tell you why the following is how it is, so just accept that it is this way :3

non-past affirmative = です (desu, I am)
non-past negative = ではありません (dewa arimasen, I am not)
past affirmative = でした (deshita, I was)
past negative = ではありませんでした (dewa arimasen deshita, I was not)

Note that the は (ha) is read as ‘wa’, so keep this in mind if you ever write it using hiragana, so you don’t write e.g. でわありません by mistake. Also note that instead of では, you can use じゃ (ja), i.e. じゃありません (ja arimasen) instead of ではありません. Personally, I prefer ではありません because it sounds ‘nicer’ in a way, but many consider it a bit ‘old school’.

With a bit of practice, you should have this down in no time at all. To help you out, I’m gonna start making some very short posts were you can test yourself concerning what you have just learned, since in terms of learning, practical experience > only theory. So expect a ‘test’ on verb identification (last lesson) and one on verb conjugation soon! :3