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What are particles?

Particles aren’t really words, as they have no actual meaning except to define what part of speech, or to define relationship to another word. It is not surprising that in casual conversation, most particles are dropped.

 In Japanese, particles come after the word, whereas in English, they are usually found before. The particle is in blue. Take the sentence:

English: In Tokyo ... Japanese: Tokyo ni ...

WA is a particle. This may get very confusing later on, but WA, along with GA, are subject particles.

Just like math, X is the same thing as Y. With this sentence structure, you can say things like, “I’m a student”; “My name is Annie”; “It’s three o’clock”; “My major is Japanese Language”; “My mom is a teacher”; “My teacher is cute”; “Barney is scary”; etc. etc. There are so many things you can do with this sentence structure.

Examples:

• Watashiwa gakusee desu. -- I am a student.
• Sanji desu. -- It’s three o’clock
• Hahawa sensee desu. -- My mom is a teacher.
• Annie desu. -- I am Annie.
• Senseewa kawaii desu. -- My teacher is cute.

Notice how in some of the examples there is no wa. To avoid redundancy, or when whomever you’re speaking with knows already what the subject is, it isn’t necessary to repeat it. For example, if you were going to talk about yourself, it would be weird to say “Watashi wa” over and over again when you could simply just drop it, as everyone knows you’re talking about yourself.

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