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The Japanese sentence structure is very different from what we are used to in English.
Here is an example. In English we say:

John eats dinner in the restaurant with Mary.

However, if you were to literally translate a Japanese sentence word-for-word, you

would get something like:

John restaurant in Mary with dinner eats.

Deconstructing this a little further, we get a basic sentence skeleton that looks like
this:

(subject) wa (place) de (person) to (object) o (verb).

(Note: | ,
, , and  are particles, which are explained on the Japanese particles
page)

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Let¶s leave Mary and the restaurant out of the picture for now just to keep things
simple. Here is the simplest Japanese sentence structure:
(John) wa (dinner) o (eats).
(subject) wa (object) o (verb).

You can literally just replace the subject, object, verb in the above sentence format to
make a wide variety of sentences. All you need to do is learn some vocabulary to fill
in the blanks.

(John) wa (dinner) o (eats).

2|     


(I) wa (book) o (read).

  | 



(My friend) wa (water) o (drinks).



|




(You) wa (Japanese) o (study).

  |  


Little extra bits of information, like who John was eating dinner with and where John
was eating dinner can be added to the basic Japanese sentence structure by placing
them between the subject and the object.

(John) wa (restaurant) de (Mary) to (dinner) o (eats).

2|  
     


(I) wa (book) to (newspaper) o (read).

  | 



(My friend and I) wa (restaurant) de (water) o (drink).

  

|  





(You) wa (computer) de (Japanese) o (study).

  |  
 


With a bit of practice this can become very simple, and you¶ll be able to say almost
anything after memorizing a few verbs and nouns and inserting them into this
Japanese sentence structure.

Additionally, you can string multiple simple sentences like this together with the
following words:
 
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 and


 but

  therefore
   because

For Example:

John eats dinner in the restaurant with Mary and drinks water.
(John) wa (restaurant) de (Mary) to (dinner) o (eats) soshite (water) o (drinks).
2|  
     





I read books but don¶t read the newspaper.

wa (books) o (read) demo (newspaper) o (don¶t read).
  | 







My friend drinks water in the restaurant therefore he is eating lunch.

(Friend) wa (restaurant) de (water) o (drinks) dakara (lunch) o (eats).


|  




     


You study Japanese on the computer because you are a student.

(You) wa (computer) de (Japanese) o (study) nazenara (student) (are).
  |  
 
   


So with this simple Japanese sentence structure, you should be able to say just about
everything you need to get by in Japan. All you need to do is get comfortable using it
and memorize a few words to fill in blanks.

è&

English is a subject-verb-object language. (so are French, Spanish, etc.) Japanese is a subject-
object-verb language. (so are Korean, Turkish, etc.) Generally the subject comes first, then the
object and the verb comes at the end of the sentence.

subject object verb

"   
 
Mr. Tanaka apple eat.

"  

 c 
Tom TV watched.
rSanr is a title of respect added to a name. (so it can not be used when referring to oneself.)
rWar and ror are particles. They are like English prepositions, but they always come after nouns.
Particles are very important for proper Japanese sentence structure. I will introduce them
gradually later.

Composing questions in Japanese is easy! The word order remains the same, and a sentence
becomes a question by adding the particle rkar at the end. Question marks are not used in
Japanese.

Tanaka-san wa
ringo o tabemasuka. Does Mr. Tanaka eat apples?
ü


Tom-san waterebi o mimashitaka.
Did Tom watch TV?