MODULE 1

UNIT 1. GRAMMAR

SLIDE 1

I have already told you that Japanese is an agglutinative language, meaning that all
grammatical indicators such as suffixes, postpositions, auxiliary words are attached
to content words — nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs.

Today we are going to discuss parts of speech, the word order in a Japanese sentence,
and interrogative sentences in Japanese.

SLIDE 2

All words in Japanese can be either content or auxiliary. Content words are nouns,
adjectives and adverbs, verbs, different kinds of pronouns, numerals, interjections.

Auxiliary words are various particles, including case particles, postpositions,

conjunctions, nominalizers, and copular verbs, or copulas. Auxiliary words always
stand after content words.

SLIDE 3

There are almost no regular grammar forms of gender or number in Japanese. It is

only in certain cases that we can trace back how these categories used to be rendered,
but none of those patterns are used for modern word formation. For example, stem
reduplication (or doubling) — in the words ‘国々’ (countries) from ‘国’ (country);
or ‘人々’ (people) from ‘人’ (person). Using the suffix ‘しょ’ in the word ‘諸国’
(countries). But all those are singular examples.

SLIDE 4

There are only two tenses in Japanese: the past tense and the present/future tense.
Characteristic of Japanese is that the tense is a category not only of verbs, like in
English, but also of adjectives.

SLIDE 5

A difficult thing when learning Japanese is its grammatical expression of speech

styles: polite-colloquial and formal-written. Formal-written forms of verbs and
adjectives in the present/future tense are featured in dictionaries and end with the
suffix う or る, while polite-colloquial forms are derived with special ‘polite’
suffixes and forms of a copula, so polite-colloquial speech is also called ‘des/mas
style’.

First, we will study the dictionary, neutral-written forms of verbs, and then learn
how to derive from them forms with various grammar meanings.

SLIDE 6

The word order in Japanese is fixed. In general, the entire structure of a sentence is
defined by three rules.

Rule 1: The predicate always ends the sentence, whether it is expressed by a verb,
an adjective or a noun.

Rule 2: The attribute always precedes the modified word, whether it is expressed by
an adjective, a noun, a verb or a relative clause.

Rule 3: The direct object always stands as close as possible to the predicate.

SLIDE 7

And now let us see how this works. Let us try to change the word order in an English
sentence according to the rules of Japanese syntax.

For example, let us take the following sentence: The most active students will go to
Japan. The subject is ‘students’, the predicate is ‘will go’. As per Rule 2, we should
find an attribute to the subject. It is the word ‘active’, so it will precede the word
‘students’. Do we have an attribute to the word ‘active’? Yes, ‘the most’. We need
to put an adverbial modifier between the subject and the predicate: the word ‘Japan’
with the preposition that as per rules of the Japanese language has to become a
POSTposition. So, the result is: ‘The most active students this summer Japan to will
go’. This is the word order in the Japanese sentence.

SLIDE 8

And how can we turn an affirmative sentence into a yes/no question? That is super
easy! You need to finish the sentence with the interrogative particle КА.
If we look at the previous sentence again, the question whether the students will go
to Japan will sound as follows: ‘The most active students Japan to will go КА’. And
you do not even need to put a question mark, as you can easily identify a question
in writing if you see the particle КА.