A more in-depth look into Japanese sentence structure

In my previous post, I discussed about the basic sentence structure and how Japanese people think to form sentences. Now, let’s take a look at more basic Japanese sentences.

これ　は　かれ　の　ペン　です”kore wa kare no pen desu” means “This is his pen”

So think of the arrow that goes from これは”kore wa” to かれ　の”kare no” and then to ペン　です”pen desu”.

So the biggest component will be express out first then follow by the less bigger component. Just like an organization chart in a company. The manager first then follow by supervisors and then workers. Japanese sentences gets complicated when you place a structure of sentence within a sentence. But its not so hard once you get used to the post-sentence structuring and start thinking from the biggest component down to the smaller component.

For the more complicated sentence structure, I will get to that discussion in the near future.

Let’s look at another sentence structure.

わたし　は　がっこう　に　いきます”watashi wa gakkou ni ikimasu”

§  “watashi wa” is the subject that the speaker wants to talk about. Which is himself/herself as you can see from here.

§  “gakkou ni” is to show the location or place where something is about to take place. In this case, “school”

§  “ikimasu” means “to go”

So, you can see from here again, that this sentence structure starts from the bigger component to the smaller component. “I”-> “to school”->”go”. I’m sure you all notice that the particles always comes after any noun. Just like this one “watashi wa”. The “wa” is the particle that comes after the “watashi”. Same for “gakkou ni”. “ni” also comes after the noun “gakkou”, school. Some of you might be wondering why. Remember I told you all that Japanese sentences are post-position? So that is the reason why they place their particles after their nouns.

(Just to let you all know, “pre” means before and “post” means after :))