Particles
Particles are short words in Japanese grammar that connect and modify all kinds of Japanese words and sentences. Like the word "desu", most of these particles cannot easily be translated into English. One particle we covered previous was wa, which serves as a subject indicator. Below is a list of the most important particles in Japanese and what they are used for. Many of these particles will be explained further in other lessons.
- wa: topic indicator (see the basic sentence)
- ga: subject indicator
- no: posession indicator
- to: connector ("and")
- ya: connector ("and")
- ka: question marker
- o: direct object indicator
- ni: indirect object indicator
If you're looking for a complete list of particles, you can visit the Wikipedia page on Japanese particles. One thing to note about the Japanese language though, is that as one website puts it, it isn't as "gramatically fussy". If you make a mistake regarding particles, you won't sound as bad or illiterate as making a similar mistake in English.