言葉セット · Kotoba Setto

Japanese grammar, the first fifteen

These are the patterns a beginner meets in the first months and keeps getting wrong for a year: the particles that decide what each part of a sentence is doing, and the handful of verb endings that carry permission, prohibition and condition. Each lesson gives the form, what it actually claims, three worked examples with furigana, and the patterns it is most often confused with.

Free to read, no account. They are also seeded into every Kotoba Setto deck at no charge and never count towards the free 100 words, so you can put them on a review schedule rather than reading them once.

Particles

The small words that say what each part of a sentence is doing. Japanese leans on them the way English leans on word order, which is why a sentence can look like a pile of nouns until the particles click.

は vs が wa vs ga N5 topic marker (は) vs subject marker (が) wo / o N5 direct object marker ni N5 destination, target, time-point, indirect object, location of existence de N5 location of action, means/tool, cause, time-span to N5 with (accompaniment), and (exhaustive list), quotation marker から・まで kara / made N5 from (source, start-point) / until (endpoint, limit) no N5 linking particle — possessive, attribute, nominalizer mo N5 also / too / even — inclusion particle ka N5 question marker (sentence-end); or (between nouns); whether (embedded question) e / he N5 direction toward (movement-only)

Verb patterns

Endings that attach to a verb and change what it is claiming — permission, prohibition, a condition, something you have done before.

〜てはいけない te wa ikenai N5 must not do; is not allowed to 〜たら tara N4 if / when / after — conditional & sequential 〜ながら nagara N4 while doing (two actions at once, same subject) 〜たことがある ta koto ga aru N5 have done before; have experience of 〜てもいい temo ii N5 may do; it's okay to do (permission)

Reading a rule once is not the same as having it. In the app these fifteen sit in their own review pile, separate from your vocabulary, and come back as fill-in-the-blank questions at widening intervals until they stick.

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