Word of the Day #10 and Sentences

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.