Sentence structure in Japanese

Sentence structure in Japanese

Gaining a basic understanding of Japanese sentence structure can be incredibly helpful, especially for native English speakers, since the two languages differ in key ways. In this section, we’ll go over some of the most important things you need to know.

the verb comes at the end

Let’s start by looking at a basic sentence that uses the verb 食(た)べる​ to eat, which we learned before.
A basic sentence in Japanese often follows this structure:

This sentence also demonstrates an important rule that applies to all Japanese sentences:

Let’s take another look at the sentence above.

私(わたし)は​ご​飯(はん)を​食(た)べる​。​

I eat​ a meal.

First of all, by coloring the words we can see that は​ has no English equivalent. This is because its purpose is to show that 私(わたし) I is the topic of the sentence. In English, there is no need for a particle like は​ because the subject of a sentence can be determined based on the order of the words in a sentence.

Secondly, since ご​飯(はん) means meal, we can see that there is no Japanese equivalent of a.

Articles like a, an and the do not exist in Japanese.

This in turn means that the sentences, I eat a meal, and, I eat the meal, would both be translated as 私(わたし)は​ご​飯(はん)を​食(た)べる​。​

If you’ve spent your entire life speaking English or a similar language, this can sometimes make a sentence feel incomplete. How do we know if we're talking about a thing or the thing? But don't worry, as with many things in language learning, these issues tend to become clearer with context and after spending more time with the language.

Sentence order in Japanese

As seen in the example sentence above, English follows Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order when making simple statements, while Japanese is predominantly a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) language. It's important to note that these word order classifications are broad generalizations and that the ordering does vary.

In Japanese, important information is placed at the beginning of the sentence. Because Japanese marks the roles of the elements in a sentence with particles, switching things around is not as restricted as in English.

Furthermore, we have seen that some grammatical sentences will include neither a subject nor an object if their meanings are obvious in context. This leads to five possible word orders in Japanese: SOV, OSV, SV, OV, and V.

In English, when trying to express information, inform listeners about how things relate to each other, and what role they play, we need prepositions like in, on, at, to and from.

In Japanese this is achieved with particles. So far we learned how to use the particles は​, が​, の​, も​, を​, で​ and に​. These are placed alongside elements in the sentence to define their role.

To form a sentence, we just need to insert each piece of information - together with its particle - into our general sentence structure from before.

The topic is only placed at the beginning of the sentence because that is its natural location in most situations. It is not, as seen before, a requirement.

Let’s do this with an example sentence:

I am the topic and 食(た)べる​ eat is our verb. Thus, the additional information is:

As the word order in Japanese is flexible, the same sentence could also be written as follows:

Takeaways