The Basic Sentence

To be able to continue studying Japanese, you must understand the structure of an average simple Japanese sentence. English, like German, Spanish, French, and Italian, is an SVO language, which means that a simple sentence is written as Subject-Verb-Object, such as "the book is expensive". Japanese, however, like Korean, Mongolian, and Turkish, is an SOV language, so a sentence is as such: Subject-Object-Verb. Instead of "the book is expensive", it is worded as "the book expensive is".

Here are some vocabulary words to look over before we continue the lesson.

There, now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's begin the lesson. The most basic japanese sentence goes as such: "[noun] wa [something] desu". This translates to "[noun] is [something]". Note that "[something]" can be either a noun or an adjective. This sentence structure could be used with saying many things. Here are a few example sentences that use this sentence structure:

Try putting other words together to make sentences. On the next lesson, you can find even more words to turn into sentences!

Important Note: New learners of Japanese often mispronounce the word desu. The u in the word is extremely short, and should result in the word being pronounced as "dess".

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