How are you guys doing? It me, your homie and senpai again


Last post I talked about basic sentence structure is japanese. And I recall saying something like

Forming an actual japanese sentence requires more than just word per word translation (I.e particles)

So you might have guessed what today's grammar post is gonna be about
If you haven't, it's about

particles

So, what are particles in japanese?


Particles are the most important building block of the japanese language
They act as glue that sticks the different words of a sentence together

Put simply, they tell us what kind of relation the words have with each other in a sentence


All of the major roles in a sentence – the topic, subject, object, location, time, destination, means, and more – are defined by a particle. They each relate directly to the verb, with the particle telling us what that relationship is.


Particles are written generally in hiragana.

There are Many particles in japanese, but for now we will just be learning the basic ones. So
you can expect the next few (maybe more than a few) posts to be about one or two particles each


Today's particles is

は・wa

Note: when は (ha) is written as a particles, it's read/pronounced as "wa"

This particles is a topic marker. Which means that it marks the topic of a sentence.
This particle is usually placed right after the topic word/phrase.


In the sentence 私は学生・わたし は がくせい・ watashi wa gakusei (学生 means student)
Particles は is following 私・わたし・wa ta shi.
Which means that "watashi" or "I" is the topic of this sentence.

Important: は doesn't directly refer to the grammatical subject of a sentence.
When は follows a word, let's say X, in english it would translate to as "as for X, ....."

So, if in the sentence "I like cats" は follows "I", then it would mean "As for me, I like cats"

If you have any questions please ask me and I will try my best to explain 😊

Note: I am also learning japanese myself, so I might have made some mistakes. I did try to fact check everything before I wrote it, but I am only human after all. So if you spot any mistakes, please tell me🙏
(Probably should have added this in every post😅)

Websites I used for this post:
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Link to previous posts:
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This post ended up being a little longer than I thought but the next posts will be smaller.
thanks for reading 😊
Have a great day everyone😊