I wanted to touch base on the topic of sentences today. I'm sure some of you have noticed by looking at the example sentences or you might already know that Japanese sentences are not structured the same as English sentences. English uses a Subject Verb Object (SVO) sentence structure. However, Japanese uses a Subject Object Verb (SOV) sentence structure. Additionally, words will usually be paired with a suffix which marks what position it is taking in the sentence.
For example, in English we would say "I am Japanese." "I" is the subject, "am" is the verb, and "Japanese" is the object. This same sentence would be written as "I Japanese am" if we followed SOV sentence structure. In Japanese we would write this as
私は日本人
です。
As you saw in the example sentence, the character は was after
私 (I). This character is usually pronounced as "ha" but in this case, it is pronounced "wa". は is used to mark the subject of the sentence. It is also important to remember that Japanese does not use particles like "the" or "a".
Kanji: 日本人
Kana: にほんじん
Romaji: nihonjin
Example
Kanji: 私は日本人です。
Kana: わたしはにほんじんです。
Translastion: I am Japanese.
The last 5 Word of the Day Japanese lessons have been preparing you on how to write the days of the week. This next character will be the last character you need to read and write days of the week in Japanese.
The Japanese word for today is "Money". This word is another one of the Japanese words which will usually add お to the beginning as we saw with 水.
The next Japanese word we will be learning today is "Water". While expanding your vocabulary, it's a good idea to learn some essential words. When asking for a drink of water, you should add the honorific お to the beginning of the word. You will see this in other words too.
The next Japanese word we will be learning today is "Fire". This word is pretty straight forward and the character also looks very similar to 人 which we covered earlier. I'm sure you will have no trouble memorizing this one!
