Parts of Speech in Japanese

Introduction

You might be questioning whether you really need to learn all this "Parts of Speech" stuff, and I get it. Even I used to think that this is all just mumbo-jumbo, but looking back now, not knowing this stuff really got in the way of understanding some grammar points, and even delayed some cool epiphanies!

With that said, go ahead and scroll down—this is gonna come in handy.

So What Are The Parts Of Speech in Japanese?

Every word in a language belongs to a certain “part of speech”, and they help us recognize what function they have in a sentence. If we know what part of speech a word is, we can immediately know how to use it.

In Japanese, the parts of speech include nouns (名詞めいし), verbs (動詞どうし), adjectives (形容詞けいようし), adverbs (副詞ふくし), and, a possibly unfamiliar one: particles (助詞じょし).

You may already recognize most of these, but there are a few differences from their English counterparts so let's have a refresher! Starting with...

Nouns (名詞めいし)

As in English, nouns can be a person, place, or thing. They make up the majority of the words in a language, including Japanese, and they're also the most fun to learn. Who wouldn't want to learn words like "pepperoni" and "pizza", amirite?

For the most part, Japanese nouns and English nouns are pretty similar. However, I should mention that Japanese does not have the same sense of plurality that we do in English. For example, by simply adding s to a noun in English (e.g. student → students), we know there's more than one. But in Japanese, a noun can be plural or singular, without changing at all! So 学生がくせい could be “student”, or “students”! Usually, context will tell us if a noun is singular or plural, but there are also some pieces of grammar that can help us out. You'll learn what those are later on. For now, just keep an eye out for this!

Verbs (動詞どうし)

Just like in English, verbs in Japanese are "action" words. This includes things like "to eat" (yum), "to sleep" (yay), and "to appear" (spooky).

In Japanese, there are two kinds: 五段ごだん (Godan) verbs and 一段いちだん (Ichidan) verbs.

Verbs are grouped into these two categories based on how they conjugate. We'll talk more about conjugation and verbs in upcoming lessons. For now, here are some examples of each verb type.

1. 

   Ichidan verbs

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     Examples: 食たべる (to eat), 寝ねる (to sleep), 見みる (to see)

2. 

   Godan verbs

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     Examples: 飲のむ (to drink), 遊あそぶ (to play), 歌うたう (to sing)

Adjectives (形容詞けいようし)

You're great. You're cool. You're awesome!

Whether English or Japanese, adjectives are words that describe or modify nouns. In Japanese however, there are two different types just like verbs:

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  い-adjectives or イ 形容詞けいようし

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  な-adjectives or ナ 形容詞けいようし

Once again, the difference between them also involves how they're conjugated. That's another thing you'll learn about in the next region!

Adverbs (副詞ふくし)

Adverbs are words that can modify an adjective, verb, or another adverb. They can add important details to a sentence:

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  "She's running." → "She's running quickly."

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  "That's sparkly." → "That's incredibly sparkly."

There are many different types of adverbs in both English and Japanese, but for now, you only need to remember what they are and do. Again, we’ll talk details in later lessons.

Particles (助詞じょし)

So what is this new, mysterious part of speech? Particles are made up of one or more hiragana, and attach to the end of a word or phrase to indicate what grammatical function it has.

To help you visualize, let's look at a simple example with すし ("sushi")!

すし on its own is just a noun to any Japanese speaker, but when we add は after it to make "すしは", we now recognize that its function in the sentence is to be the topic. Just like that!

Now particles are important, but don't sweat it if you don't completely understand them right away. I assure you, we're going to take this step by step.

Since we've got all the parts of speech in Japanese covered, we just need to go over two more things: word order, and how important context is.

Word order

This might get slightly nerdy so if you only take one thing away from this section, it should be that in Japanese sentences, the verb comes last.

English is an SVO language, which stands for subject-verb-object and it refers to the order of words within a sentence. Let’s take “Shiori eats sushi” as our example sentence. In English, the verb (”eats”) comes after the subject (“Shiori”), but before the object (“sushi”).

Subject = Shiori

Verb = eats

Object = sushi

Japanese, on the other hand, is an SOV (subject-object-verb) language. To use that same example, let me show you what that order looks like:

Following the SOV order, the Japanese sentence has the subject (しおり) appear first in the sentence. This is followed by the object (すし) and then ends with the verb (食たべます). Interesting stuff!

We won't be diving deeper than this just yet, but it's essential for you to know about the SOV order now to save you some confusion in the future. So, remember: the verb comes at the end of the sentence in Japanese.

Importance of Context in 日本語にほんご

For the final part of this lesson, here's something that'll give you a boost in understanding upcoming grammar lessons and example sentences:

Extremely short or even one-word sentences are very common in Japanese as the language tends to heavily rely on context. Once something has been mentioned, it typically won’t be brought up again in the same conversation unless it’s necessary.

We have instances like this in English too. If someone asks "How many tacos do you want?", a one-word answer of "Two" is enough. It makes sense as it is! You're definitely getting two delicious tacos and I am deathly jealous.

But Japanese goes even further than that. To show you, let's take a look at a sentence of just one single verb.

「食たべました。」

This, literally translated, only means "ate", but even without a subject, people can understand this as "I ate it", or "(someone) ate it" depending on the context. Sure, it can be confusing at first, but hey, it's pretty efficient. So in the future, when you come across one-word sentences that are translated into full sentences, it's because of Japanese and its love of context.

All in all, when it comes to Japanese, paying a bit more attention than usual won't hurt!

Summary

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  All words belong to a certain “part of speech” that helps us determine their function in a sentence. In Japanese, these include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and particles.

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  There are two types of verbs in Japanese: godan verbs, and ichidan verbs.

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  Adjectives also have two types: い-adjectives and な-adjectives.

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  Particles are made of one or more hiragana that we attach to an end of a word or phrase to indicate what grammatical function it has.

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  Japanese uses the word order of Subject-Object-Verb when making sentences. This is why we find the verb at the end of the sentence.

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  Japanese sentences tend to rely a lot on context, which leads to a lot of omissions. Watch out!