
What’s the difference between furigana and okurigana? When should I use a counter and when a particle? What on earth is a copula?
When you’re new to learning Japanese, or a foreign language in general, one of the surprising hurdles to overcome is the jargon… in your own language! So many technical terms are thrown around flippantly and rarely explained outright that it’s easy to get lost.
This series serves as a basic introduction to some terms that you’re bound to meet on your journey towards Japanese fluency. This isn’t an exhaustive vocabulary list but rather a primer on a few terms that you might find difficult to wrap your head around as a beginner.
We’ve started with Japanese writing, and this time we’ll look at Japanese grammar.
- Japanese writing vocab refresh
- Japanese grammar vocab refresh
- Japanese pronunciation vocab refresh
- Japanese etiquette vocab refresh
Copula
In English, we say ‘My name is Tom.’ The key to this sentence is the verb to be. We can say “I am Tom.” and it gets exactly the same meaning across. To say what something is in Japanese, we normally use です, linguistically called the copula. You can stick any noun before です. For example, In case of giving our name, we simply say:トムです。 I am Tom.
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