Not having time to attend a course is no longer an impediment to learning a new language, times have changed and the internet has made many tasks easier that could be complicated before. Proof of this is the ease with which today we can get all kinds of material, content or resources to help us prepare intellectually in any area.
Thus, it is no longer necessary to go to a bookstore and pay for a few books that often have outdated information. The PDF Japanese books on our website offer you fresh, updated and totally dynamic content, so that when you learn this language you can enjoy it and get the most out of it. With us you only need to have an internet connection and a device such as a tablet, a computer or even a smartphone and get going. Remember, with this kind of tools the secret to take advantage of them is in the constancy and discipline that you put to the study of the content.
We hope you liked it and already have your next book! If you found this list useful, do not forget to share it on your social networks. Here we present our complete selection of Books to Learn Japanese:. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam 4. A "real manga, real Japanese" study guide and resource for language students and teachers. Now in a smaller size from the previous orange version! The best website for learning Japanese grammar is now in print!
My website www. It will help you finally understand those pesky particles and break down grammatical concepts that will allow you to comprehend anything from simple to very complex sentences. You will also learn Japanese that's spoken by real people including casual speech patterns and slang, stuff that's often left out in most textbooks.
A "real manga, real Japanese" study guide and resource for language students and teachers Author : Wayne P. This is a clear, simple and compact guide to colloquial, everyday Japanese. Acquire basic proficiency in spoken Japanese. A streamlined, efficient approach. Perfect for self—learners or classroom use. Includes kanji and kana. In fact, nothing will stop us from making a sentence with [Object] [Subject] [Verb] or just [Object] [Verb].
The following sentences are all complete and correct because the verb is at the end of the sentence. Just remember the following rules. This also includes the implied state-of-being. Except for one exception, see above. We have already gone over very powerful constructs that can express almost anything we want.
We will also learn how to modify nouns directly with nouns. The three particles we will cover can group nouns together in different ways.
This is the last lesson that will be specifically focused on particles but that does not mean that there are no more particles to learn. We will learn many more particles along the way but they may not be labeled as such. As long as you know what they mean and how to use them, it is not too important to know whether they are particles or not. It implies that there may be other things that are unlisted and that not all items in the list may apply.
The noun that is being modified can be omitted if the context clearly indicates what is being omitted. The following highlighted redundant words can be omitted. The particle then becomes a generic noun, which we can treat just like a regular noun. Now we can use the direct object, topic, and identifier particle with verbs and adjectives. The subordinate clauses are highlighted. I have no idea why this is possible. This type of sentence has an embedded meaning that explains the reason s for something else.
This sounds very soft and feminine. Besides this one case, everything else remains the same as before. This grammar can have what seems like many different meaning because not only can it be used with all forms of adjectives, nouns, and verbs it itself can also be conjugated just like the state of being. A conjugation chart will show you what this means.
This grammar is indispensable for seeking explanations in questions. The examples will have literal translation to make it easier to see how the meaning stays the same and carries over into what would be very different types of sentences in normal English. A more natural English translation is provided as well because the literal translations can get a bit convoluted.
Alice: Where are you going? Expecting that there is class Bob: No, there is no class now. Expecting that there is no class Bob: No, I do have class.
Expecting that the person would buy Bob: No, the teacher is going to. Alice: Should not have eaten breakfast, you know. However, in Japanese it is a perfectly normal expression, as you will begin to realize once you get accustomed to Japanese. Well, the two are not related to each other but I have decided to group them in one lesson because we will be covering only the two most common gobi for now and it is too short to be a separate lesson in itself.
Properties of Adverbs Unlike English, changing adjectives to adverbs is a very simple and straightforward process. In addition, since the system of particles make sentence ordering flexible, adverbs can be placed anywhere in the clause that it applies to long as it comes before the verb that it refers to.
As usual, we have two separate rules: one for i-adjectives, and one for na-adjectives. Of course this also depends on the context. The literal translation kind of gives you a sense of why the target particle is used.
There is some argument against calling this an adverb at all but it is convenient for us to do so because of the grouping of i-adjectives and na-adjectives. These words can be used without particles just like regular adverbs. In this guide, I will use it to describe the one or two hiragana characters that always come at the end of sentences due to the lack of better terminology.
These endings are often very hard to explain because many do not actually have a specific meaning. The two we will cover here do have meanings and they are used quite often.
But it will rain tomorrow, you know. You cannot reverse the order. Now that we have a general knowledge of how Japanese works, we can now extend that by learning specific grammar for various situations. This section will go over what is considered to be essential grammar for basic practical Japanese.
You will begin to see fewer literal translations in order to emphasize the new grammar now that you should have a good understanding of the basic fundamental grammar. This section starts with transforming what we have learned so far into a more unassuming and politer form. In any language, there are ways to word things differently to express a feeling of deference or politeness. However, Japanese is different in that not only does the type of vocabulary change, the grammatical structure for every sentence changes as well.
There is a distinct and clear line differentiating polite and casual types of speech. On the one hand, the rules clearly tell you how to structure your sentences for different social contexts.
On the other hand, every sentence you speak must be conjugated to the proper level of politeness. In section 3, we will cover the polite version of Japanese, which is required for speaking to people of higher social position or to people you are unfamiliar with.
This section will then continue to cover the most useful major types of grammar in Japanese. For this reason, we will learn the most common conjugations such as the te-form, potential, conditional, and volitional.
The latter sections are in no particular order and neither does it need to be. The grammar that is presented here is essential which means that you have to learn it all anyway and learn them well.
Goes over rules of conjugation for the polite form. Also covers the various types of pronouns and their appropriate uses. Also discusses the use of the question marker in other contexts. Introduces the ever useful te-form. A must-read for getting dates in Japan! It will be more useful than you may think because store clerks, receptionists, and such will speak to you in those forms. Fortunately, it is not difficult to change casual speech to polite speech.
Essentially, the only main difference between polite and casual speech comes at the very end of the sentence. You cannot even tell whether a person is speaking in polite or casual speech until the sentence is finished. The Stem of Verbs In order to conjugate all u-verbs and ru-verbs into their respective polite forms, we will first learn about the stem of verbs.
This is often called the masu-stem in Japanese textbooks but we will call it just the stem because it is used in many more conjugations than just its masu-form. The stem when used by itself can be a very specialized and limited way of creating nouns from verbs. In fact, in very rare cases, the stem is used more often than the verb itself. However, in general we cannot take any verb and make it into a noun.
For example, the following sentence is wrong. Things that are written in a formal context such as newspaper articles also use the stem as a conjunctive verb. We will come back to this later in the Formal Expressions lesson. When we learn compound sentences, we will see that each sub-sentence of the compound sentence can end in masu-form as well. Here is a chart.
Just like the masu-form, this must also go at the end of a complete sentence. Here is a chart illustrating the conjugations. A very common mistake is to do the same for i-adjectives. The most natural translation is that someone likes puppies very much but there is not enough context to rule out that the puppies like something very much. In normal everyday conversations, the conjugation presented here will be used almost every time. In conclusion, I recommend studying and becoming familiar with both types of conjugations.
However, I want to point some several key differences here and the reasons why they are in fact completely different things. For the rest of you new to this, you can easily skip this part. This grammar is covered in a later section. For instance, consider the two following sentences. It is best to think of them as totally separate things because they are.
Addressing People Properly in Japanese Not only is it important to use the right type of language with the right people, it is also important to address them by the right name. It is also important to address yourself with the proper level of politeness. Some of these words are not as common and others are hopelessly outdated. We will go over the most common ones that are in use today. In other words, there are words that are usually used by males and words that are usually only used by females and they all depend on the social context.
This is the reading you is used in a formal context for example, a speech by the president of a company. This reading will probably be accompanied with honorific and humble forms, which we will cover later. I hope that the examples with Bob, Alice, and Jim have shown that people refer to other people by their names even when they are directly addressing that person.
Most of the time, you do not need to use anything at all because you are directly addressing the person. You will rarely need to use any of these words, especially the ones in the second half of the list. The person using this is maybe miffed off about something. Sounds like you want to beat someone up. Sounds like you want to take someone out. I only go over it so you can understand and enjoy comic books yourself!
Referring to Family Members Referring to family members is a little more complicated than English. It could be worse, try learning Korean!
For the purpose of brevity, since this is a grammar guide and not a vocabulary guide we will only go over the immediate family. There is also a distinction between older and younger siblings. The following chart list some of the most common terms for family members. There may also be other possibilities not covered in this chart. While it is entirely possible to express a question even in polite form using just intonation, the question marker is often attached to the very end of the sentence to indicate a question.
My stomach is a little full. The Question Marker in Casual Speech It makes sense to conclude that the question marker would work in exactly the same way in casual speech as it does in polite speech. However, this is not the case. It is often used to consider whether something is true or not. Depending on the context and intonation, it can also be used to make rhetorical questions or to express sarcasm.
A question marker attached to the end of a subordinate clause makes a mini-question inside a larger sentence. This allows the speaker to talk about the question. You can also include the alternative as well to mean the same thing. Take a look at what adding the question marker does to the meaning of the words. For example, we will learn how to chain separate sentences together to express multiple actions or states. Ex: He is rich, handsome, and charming. Expressing a Sequence of States It is very easy to combine a chain of nouns and adjectives to describe a person or object.
He is Y. He is Z. The last noun or adjective remains the same as before. Expressing a Sequence of Verbs with the te-Form In a similar fashion, you can express multiple actions. It is usually interpreted as a sequence of event. There are two forms: positive and negative. The tense of all the actions is determined by the tense of the last verb.
This sentence sounds a bit odd. Either the reason or the cause can be omitted if it is clear from the context. This is something I call causation where [X] happened, therefore [Y] happened. Often times, especially when introducing a new topic, it is used as a general connector of two separate sentences. You can also use this with the state of being to say that you are a number of things at various random times among a larger list.
I knew I learned this for some reason! Other Uses of the te-Form The te-form is incredibly useful as it is used widely in many different types of grammatical expressions. Even though we have learned various conjugations for verbs, they have all been one-time actions. However, it only indicates a one-time thing; you are something or not. This grammar, however, describes a continuing state of an action verb. This usually translates to the gerund in English except for a few exceptions, which we will examine later.
You can then treat the result as a regular ru- verb. The entire result conjugates as a ru-verb. The examples show the masu-form and plain negative conjugations. This is a convenience for speaking. Here are the abbreviated versions of the previous examples. You will be amazed at the extensive types of abbreviations that exist in casual speech. You may also be amazed at how long everything gets in super polite speech. Basically, you will get the abbreviations if you just act lazy and slur everything together.
Particles also get punted off left and right. In fact, there is a ambiguity in whether one is in a state of doing an action versus being in a state that resulted from some action. This is usually decided by context and common practices. I did the action of knowing today.
But unfortunately, this is not the case. You completed the motion, and now you exist in that state. She came and is here. Usually, this expression is used to explain that something is in a state of completion. The completed action also carries a nuance of being completed in preparation for something else.
For these examples, it may make more sense to think of them as a sequence of actions: hold and go, or hold and come. Here are a couple more examples. The motion verbs can also be used in time expressions to move forward or come up to the present. All verbs conjugated into the potential form become a ru-verb. The Potential Form Once again, the conjugation rules can be split into three major groups: ru-verbs, u-verbs, and exception verbs. For example the following sentences are incorrect.
If however, you wanted to say that you were given the opportunity to see or hear something, you would use the regular potential form. These nouns act more like particles than actual nouns because they are never used by themselves but rather only in grammatical expressions.
However, unlike particles, we can apply the same grammatical rules as regular nouns. Pretty clever, huh? I hope the literal translations give you a sense of why the example sentences mean what they do. Oh, if only it was as simple as English. This means that if [X] happens, [Y] will happen as a natural consequence. No question about it. If I drop a ball, it will fall to the ground. If I turn off the lights at night, it will get dark. We can express this type of condition in the following format.
The speaker is saying that the following condition will occur in that situation, no matter what. You can use this particle to express what will happen given a certain context.
The contextual conditional always requires a context in which the conditional occurs. The following is incorrect. This means exactly the same thing except that it has a more formal nuance. However, it cannot be used with nouns and na-adjectives.
This rule also applies to ru-verbs. For i-adjectives and verbs, it is very difficult to differentiate between the two types of conditionals, and you can make life easier for yourself by considering them to be the same. However, if you must insist, I searched around the web for an explanation of the difference that I can agree with. Here16 is the original text. The past conditional is the only type of conditional where the result can be in the past.
This has little to do with conditionals but it is explained here because the grammatical structure is the same. Well, if you want to say a conditional, you need to use one of the conditionals discussed above.
We will cover how to say this in Japanese because it is a useful expression and it also ties in well with the previous section. This double negative can be kind of confusing at first but you will get used to it with practice. How to say: Must [verb] 1. The second method uses the natural conditional that we learned in the last lesson. In other words, you must do it. However, some combinations are more common than others but I did not explicitly point out which were more common because any combination is technically correct and going over style would merely confuse at this point.
Also, keep in mind that there is nothing essentially new in terms of conjugation rules. We already covered conditionals in the last lesson and adding the wa particle to the te-form in the beginning of this section. Various Short-Cuts for the Lazy You may have been grumbling and complaining about how long most of the expressions are just to say you must do something.
Teachers are often reluctant to teach these overly familiar expressions because they are so much easier to use which is bad for times when they might not be appropriate. So here they are but take care to properly practice the longer forms so that you will be able to use them for the appropriate occasions.
Casual abbreviations for things that must be done 1. The grammar itself is also relatively easy to pick up and makes for a short section.
Some examples will come in handy. This makes sense because the conjugated form is a description of something that you want to do. This is because kanji is already used for the verb and the attached word becomes part of that verb. In other words, the volitional form indicates that someone is setting out to do something. Here are some more realistic examples. Similar to the masu-form, verbs in this form must always come at the end of the sentence.
Performing an Action on a Subordinate Clause In the section about modifying subordinate clauses,30 we learned how to treat a subordinate clause like an adjective to directly modify a noun.
We will extend the functionality of subordinate clauses by learning how to perform an action on a subordinate clause. We need something to encapsulate the subordinate clause into a unit that we can perform actions on.
This is done by making a quoted phrase. This also why we will have to eventually cover many other types of grammar to express uncertainty or probability. Basically, you are directly quoting something that was said. This type of quotation is often used for dialogue in novels and other narrative works. As long as the verb that applies to the subordinate clause comes before any other verb, you can have any number of adjectives, adverbs or nouns in between.
The Interpreted Quote The second type of quote is the quote along the lines of what someone actually said. Since this is not a direct quote, no quotations are needed. You will hear Japanese people use this all the time. Actually, as you can see from the literal translation, the meaning remains the same in Japanese but changes only when translated to normal English. However, the important point here is that by using this casual shortcut, you can drop the rest of the sentence and hope your audience can understand everything from context.
What did you say? This allowed us to talk about things that people have said, heard, thought, and more. For instance, we had the following example, which Alice used to introduce herself. This sentence pattern is probably one of the first things beginner Japanese students learn in the classroom. This idea of describing what a person is known or referred to as can also be extended to objects and places. However, we can take this idea even further by attaching two subordinate clauses.
This allows us to describe and explain just about anything ranging from a single word to complete sentences. As you can imagine, this construction is quite useful and employed quite often in Japanese. We can abstract it even further by replacing the subordinate clause with a generic way of doing something. This construction is used when you want to rephrase or redefine something such as the following dialogue. This construction is used all the time, particularly in casual conversations.
It can be used to correct something, come to a different conclusion, or even as an interjection. I have to go too. This is done as is usually the case for slang in order to make things easier to say. If it helps you to remember, you can think of it as a sequence of an action and then seeing the result. If you guessed that this next grammar for attempting to do something would involve the volitional form, you were right. This is simply an extension of the quoted subordinate clause from the last section.
Even when attending marriages or funerals, people are expected to give a certain amount of money as a gift to help fund the ceremony. You can see why properly learning how to express the giving and receiving of favors and items is a very important and useful skill.
I hope to prove in this section that it is conceptually quite straightforward and simple. You must use this verb when you are giving something or doing something for someone else.
This applies to all the other sections in this lesson as well. Because the giver is not the speaker, the teacher is either giving to the speaker or anyone else. Notice that the two sentences essentially mean the same thing. This is because the giver and receiver has been omitted because it is obvious from the context. You can use the negative to make the request a little softer. We will learn more about honorific and humble forms42 in the beginning of the next major section. Of course, since direct quotes is merely repeating something someone said in verbatim, you can put practically anything in a direct quote.
It is a soft yet firm way of issuing a command. It is used, for example, when a mother is scolding her child or when a teacher wants a delinquent student to pay attention.
It also cannot be used by itself but must be attached to another verb. The Command Form We will go over the command form in the interest of covering all the possible verb conjugations. In reality, the command form is rarely used as Japanese people tend to be too polite to use imperatives. I hope! The intonation is totally different. First of all, the number system is in units of four instead of three, which can make converting into English quite difficult.
Also, there are things called counters, which are required to count different types of objects, animals, or people. We will learn the most generic and widely used counters to get you started so that you can learn more on your own.
The Number System The Japanese number system is spread into units of four. So a number such as 10,, is actually split up as , However, thanks to the strong influence of the Western world and the standardization of numbers, when numbers are actually written, the split-off is three digits. Here are the first ten numbers. Basically, both are acceptable up to You can simply count from 1 to 99 with just these ten numbers. Only, this is where the trouble starts.
We already discussed this near the end of the Kanji section. Here are all the slight sound changes. The counter themselves are usually single kanji characters that often have a special reading just for the counter. Only, the catch is that there is another calendar which starts over every time a new emperor ascends the throne.
Finally, we get to the days of the month, which is where the headache starts. Here is a chart of exceptions to look out for. Well, those and sometimes 1, 6 and 8 are the numbers to watch out for. There are no exceptions for seconds and all the readings are the same.
I bet you thought you were done with dates and time, well guess again. This time we will learn counters for counting spans of time, days, months, and years.
You can attach it to the end of hours, days, weeks, and years. Minutes in general and seconds do not need this counter and months have a separate counter, which we will cover next. This will hopefully allow you to learn other counters on your own because there are too many to even consider covering them all.
The important thing to remember is that using the wrong counter is grammatically incorrect. If you are counting people, you must use the people counter, etc. Sometimes, it is acceptable to use a more generic counter when a less commonly used counter applies. Here are some counters.
Past that, you can just use regular plain numbers. Do you feel like your Japanese has improved? Of course this can be a little difficult to do without some practice, which is the reason for this lesson. In that sense, due to its over-use, it has almost lost any specific meaning. Its rough sound generally applies to the male gender but is not necessarily restricted to only males. However, they can make your statements sound much stronger and very gender-specific.
Use sparingly. These examples might not be very helpful without actually hearing what they sound like. We learned quite a lot of things in this section. This is of course by no means an exhaustive list but merely an illustration of how we can use what we learned in various combinations to create a lot of useful expressions. Are there any other good expressions? Kaga-sensei: Please memorize this too in preparation for the future.
Alice: Yes, I understood. It became good study! Kaga-sensei: Sure. Kaga-sensei: You should know this too. Alice: OK, I got it. That was very informative! Hey, is it OK to ask a question? Alice: What? Yousuke: I want to receive the favor of you teaching English and if, by any chance, you have time, will you give the favor of teaching? Alice: Huh? You are going to study English? Yousuke: Yeah, I was thinking that I want to try studying abroad in America. I tried to make motion toward going last year too but, without money….
Alice: Is that so? When do you want me to teach you? Yousuke: Anytime is good. Alice: Then what about from next week Thursday? Yousuke: Yeah, OK. Interpretative Translation of Example 2 Yousuke: Oh! Hey, can I ask you a question?
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