Vocabulary:
- Nouns:
- あなた (anata): you
- 骨 (hone): bone
- 面倒 (mendou): difficulty, trouble
- 理由 (riyuu): reason
- 背 (se): back, spine
- 先方 (senpou): they (like a companion)
- Verbs:
- 汗をかく (ase-o-kaku): to sweat (literally "to have sweat fall")
- 震える (furueru): to tremble, to shake, to shiver
- ない (nai): to not exist (negative form of ある/aru, this is one of those weird irregular verbs)
- 望む (nozomu): to long, to desire, to wish for
- する (suru): to do (polite form します/shimasu, one of the most well-known weird irregular verbs)
- 擁する (you suru): to have
- Adjectives/adverbs:
- 痛い (itai): hurt
- 何時までも (itsu-ji-made-mo): forever (grammatically weird, but set phrase (literally "continuing until when"))
- のように (no-you-ni): like, similar to
- 遠く (tooku): far, distant
- Particles and punctuation:
- が (ga): secondary topic particle, anything that isn't the "main" topic
- は (ha, pronounced "wa" as a particle): main topic particle
- も (mo): adverb particle (as in 何時までも), list particle, "also"
- の (no): possessive particle (Xのy -> "X's Y", note that these can be chained together, like "東京の大学の学生の本" -> "Tokyo's college's student's book")
- を (o, sometimes romanized "wo" but always pronounced just "o"): direct object particle, what is being acted on in the sentence
- 、 (comma)
- 。 (period)
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Grammar or at least an attempt at it:
- Word order is for the most part SOV. You can sometimes switch the object and subject (as long as you keep the particles designinating which is what), but the verb is ALWAYS at the end.
- Verbs have polite and casual forms. Everything here is casual form.
- Most verbs in casual form end in some variant of -る.
- Negative verbs are formed by taking the stem and adding -ない to it. The one exception is ある (to exist), which in negative form is just ない.
- In polite form (not relevant here but), verbs in present tense end in -ます, and are negated by changing the ending to -ません.
- There's no past tense in the sentence, but for the curious, in casual form the ending becomes some form of -た, and -ました in polite form.
- Adjectives come in two varieties: い-adj (ends in い) and な-adj (ends in basically anything else, must have な appended if using as a regular adjective)
- Particles are used both as word seperators and to show what function something is in the sentence (whether it's the primary subject, secondary subject(s), direct object, etc).
- Romanization is never actually used in regular Japanese, it's only provided here because I know you can't read hiragana or kanji ;)
- Syllablically, Japanese has probably the easiest pronounciation of the "main" Asian languages. Once you get used to the R sound being a weird R/L hybrid, and a few other issues, you'll be able to say anything. No tones like in Chinese, no strange vowel amalgams like in Korean, it's really not that hard once you get used to it.
- (That is, assuming you're learning the standard dialect. Good luck if you try Kansai-ben or Okinawa-ben :P)
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