Grammar lesson!

Hey guys and gals! Today I invested my time in learning a part of Japanese grammar that is crucial in everyday speech. Grasping grammatical concepts in absolutely essential when learning the Japanese language! Hold on tight, because you're about to get 'schooled'!

An English sentence may be written as follows;  "This is water."

As you can see from this simple sentence, you have the word "This", which is the subject at the beginning, and the predicate "is water." composed of the verb and the noun proceeding the verb. This is the very basic structure of a sentence in English. But, I'm sure you already knew that.

As for the very same sentence in Japanese, you might see something like: "これは水です".
Now, there are a few things about this sentence to note. This is obviously written in hiragana (with a bit of kanji), but hiragana has a few rules that I haven't been over. First, though, let me translate to how it's pronounced: "Kore wa mizu desu." This is not how it's written though. If you have a trained eye for hiragana, you'll notice that the "wa" is actually the "ha" symbol. This is because the "wa" is a particle, and in the form of a particle, the "ha" is always pronounced "wa". For example, if you looked at one of the most commonly recognized Japanese words, "こんにちは", or Konnichiwa, you'd see that it abides by the same rule.

Another thing we must take into account before we look at the sentence structure is "水", which is the only part of the sentence that is in kanji. This character means "mizu", or water. I just wanted to get that out of the way so when we learn full sentences in hiragana there won't be any confusion.

So when you're arranging a sentence in Japanese, the subject comes first (kore). What comes next is the conjunction that goes along with the verb. This is not the verb, however, it DOES go in the place of the verb usually would in an English sentence. This conjunction is the "wa". Next comes the object that the subject is describing, which, in this case, is our "mizu", or water. Finally, we add the verb at the end of the sentence, which is "desu". This creates the complete sentence "Kore wa mizu desu.".

An easy way to remember this structure is to remember - [A] wa [B] desu.

Your [A] is gonna be where you stick your subject, and the [B] is where you put the noun your verb is describing.

That was just a basic lesson in Japanese grammar for today. Tomorrow I'll teach you how to transform your nifty sentences!

That's all for now!
さようなら~Sayonara!