Rules of the game
BLUE means don’t-move words.
ORANGE means self-move words.
PURPLE means other-move words.
YELLOW means self-move words that lost their movements.
PINK means other-move words that lost their movements.
Every word links to a jisho.org page. Just click the word!
From this lesson on, I want you to know these words, in addition to previous particles, since I’ll not be linking them to jisho anymore :
だ, です, ある, する, 物 (or もの), 事 (or こと), 私
これより また いくつかの助詞を 紹介いたします (いたす is する’s old japanese form, so it’s respectful). Well… It’s still a bit early for that?
Or is it? From now on, I’ll keep some sentences in japanese in this lesson that you should be able to understand at your level, so don’t be surprised. It’s a proof that you have progressed, and that you can now take on native-like sentences, and start your immersion if you didn’t do it yet.
We’ll introduce in this lesson mainly と, か, and や particles. I call them “grouping particles”, because that’s in fact what they do, in quite different ways.
Making groups
団体は、(人々が集まって 一つになる) ものだ. It’s a mass of people, unrelated to eachother, but united for a shared goal. In a way, that’s a very sharp way to see these three particles. Since they are unrelated to eachother, I arbitrarily decided to say they are don’t move word, and I ask of you to do the same. This choice is debatable, especially for と, but the reasons are out of bounds of this lesson.
Let’s start with the particle と, probably the most used and most complex of the three.
The particle と
と forms a group with the said elements, making the formed group unique and unseparable. 最後の言葉は、「unique and unseparable」はとても重要な言葉です.
There are blades, (in addition to) helmets. The things wanted (by you) are almost all here, right?
You can see, here, that we don’t want to do a group. We do enumerate objects, but that’s really about it. It’s not really a “go-together” set, so we don’t use と. 組み合わせたもののみに「と」が使える.
So where CAN we use と? First of all, we can use to form a “normal” group :
ヒロとゼロツーはずっと一緒だよ. Hiro and Zero Two are always together.
Note that, once again, we can omit words :
私と遊ぶ？ You play with me (and you)?
We can also group verbs. Since the set is complete with と, both verbs always happen together :
勉強しないといけない : Not studying AND (things) cannot go (like this). Note that this is the common way to express obligation in japanese. This means “(I) Have to study”. それも別の動詞で使用できる :
すいませんね (すみません)。どうも、春になると 鼻がむずむず するん(Here it’s もの contracted to ん) ですよ。
I’m sorry. For some reason, it’s the thing that (it’s because) when (it) becomes spring, my nose itches.
We can see here that both Spring coming and Nose itching some together.
We can also imply that changes happened before. Since the set is always “full” with と, the word with と is always the last element :
水はまず、蒸気になって、雲になって、雨になって、そしてまた海の水となる : Water first becomes steam, then becomes clouds, then becomes rain, then finally become water of the sea once again.
And, we can also group a sentence to another, “citing” a sentence.
と particle : Linking two worlds
We saw last lesson that we could consider a whole sentence as a don’t-move word (example : いいです [it’s good], politely being). 全文を引用するには、もう一つの方法がある。 (move word + に is often used for “in order to”)
We simply link a foreign object to our current sentence. We can link sentences, sayings, sounds, feelings, ideas… with the particle と. Powerful, right?
An example : いいと思う : “(It’s) good”, (I) think. It’s obvious here that いい, “It’s good” could have very well been a standalone sentence. Another common one is …
オレかい？「めくら」って (って is the contraction of という) ヤツだよ。
Many things to note here. First, やつ works the same way as もの : it can be both a thing that can move others, or a person.
Second, いう is an other-move word, yet という and って are both always used as self-move. It’s intriguing, 私も同感する. The reason for thing is that this has been shortened. It’s normally the “receptive”, といわれる, that I’ll teach you next lesson.
And then, we get the と. As it is shown, it’s a “foreign” word affixed to the sentence, that we cite. Therefore, we use と to link it with the sentence. We get the sentence “Me? It’s the thing called “blindness”.
Second particle!
か : The particle of choice
か particle also works with groups, but this time, we choose an element from the group. Let’s take a set : [Green ; Blue ; Red]. If you want to talk about the possibilities one by one, you have to narrow them down to 1. 後はぴったり合う文例だ :
納得してくれたのか、それとも 俺がまだ 人型を保っていることに 希望を見出したのか、ぬいぐるみは語り始めた。
This sentence is good to remember everything we learned so far.
- 納得してくれた : The “Done” of “to give” + we ADD meaning of “understanding me about something” : He gave me that he understood. (Basically, he was friendly enough to understand me)
- の is the contraction of 物 : The thing can can move others, act on others… , here it means “because”.
- 人型 : Human-Form with a don’t-move / don’t-move association
- ことに 希望を見出した : The “Done” of finding hope + it’s LIMITED to the thing (the thing of keeping human form).
- ぬいぐるみは is just here to avoid confusion for who does the verb.
- 語り始めた : The “Done” of starting the talk.
We get the sentence : Either the thing that (because) he understood me, or the thing that (because) he found hope in me keeping my human form, The plushie started to talk. This is, as you can see, quite a complicated sentence, but, with all the tools that I gave you so far, you can understand it. これは あなたが進化していた という証だ.
The choice is between 2 things in this sentence, but it can be between more, and the other choices don’t have to be explicit. We have, for example :
The girl that can be classified as in front of my eyes “done” exists + meaning of scared LIMITED TO looking like (One of the possibilities which is : she saw a ghost) = The girl in front of my eyes was scared as if she saw a ghost. Here, we simply looked into the possibilities that she saw a ghost.
But it can also be very useful… for questions and undetermined things!
NANI?
Yes, I’m talking about all of these words : どこ、誰、いつ、何、なぜ、どちら… What are they? Simply, they show all the elements that fill the condition. In an affirmative sentence and all alone, you guess it’s pretty useless. But there are a few ways you can play with them :
In questions : いいですか？ Questions in japanese are made with the intonation : going up at the end of the sentence. But we also imply to “make a choice” : Is it okay? Yes, or No. どこに行きますか？Where are you going? Here, There or To the moon.
While, in theory, we would always find か for questions, using か along with casual speech is often viewed as manly/rude, so let’s be careful. We often also see の from our もの in casual speech to ask questions. 行くの？ If you think about it, it’s almost like the sentence continues after the answer, and the fact that questions like this don’t end with a move word proves this.
But these undefined words can also be there on affirmative! Here’s an example :
いつでもどこまでも走るよ : I run even if we add “undetermined time” and even if we add “until undetermined place”.
We can deduce いつも = All time and いつでも = At any time. も here is used in an expression, the only time it has a “grammatical” use. いつか = One particular, undefined time. And it works the same way for all of these “undefined” terms. Not too hard, right?
One last, easy particle : 最期の簡単な助詞
The particle や
This is the particle of incomplete group/list. Simple as that. Nothing too tricky. マークやエリックがいる : There is Mark, Eric and other people that we don’t cite. There’s really nothing to add to this, it’s generally only used to make a group of don’t-move words.
Next lessons, we’ll see the last forms of move words you will need for your immersion. There are only two lessons left for this main lesson, which proves your full ability to jump into native content. You can already understand a lot, and you know it. Let’s go!
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