Japanese grammar for beginners to learn the language seems simple. Certainly many times easier than in Russian, English or German. There is no change in persons and numbers in it, and there is also no feminine and neuter gender. Unusually for us, the difficulties with these basics arise only at the beginning.
To fully understand oral speech, it is enough to memorize about three hundred popular constructions. This is a clear indication of how elementary Japanese grammar is.
The biggest difficulty to face at the beginning will be the unusual word order in the sentence.
Sentence structure
The subject is always at the beginning of a sentence (precedes the predicate), while the predicate is only at the end of the sentence (or before the respectful copula desu in the formal style). Functional words are written after the significant word, and the secondary members of the sentence are written before the main ones. Word order always remains clear and unchanged.
Contextually clear words, connectives and particles are often omitted (both spoken and written). You can even omit the predicate or subject,unless it affects the overall meaning of the sentence.
Writing structure
Japanese is a combination of three scripts. They are closely intertwined, so knowledge of each is essential.
Hieroglyphs are not just a set of pictures. They obey certain laws, are formed into groups. Simple hieroglyphs are usually part of more complex ones. The meaning of a complex character can sometimes be understood from the meaning of its simple components.
Because the characters (kanji) were adopted from the Chinese in the sixth century, the Japanese had to add endings, particles and conjugations to them in order to adapt them to Japanese accents, morphology and syntax. To record them, the hiragana syllabary is used, in which all words of native Japanese origin are written. Also, hiragana can be used to read hieroglyphs, particles and endings (okurigana), complex kanji. Japanese who study their native language in schools or on their own use hiragana for explanatory captions.
The katakana alphabet was created for writing borrowed words, terms, geographical and topographical names, nicknames, names and surnames of foreigners. Less commonly, it performs a function similar to Russian italics.
In almost every sentence, Japanese grammar closely links all three types of writing.
Hieroglyph is an analogue of the word root in Russian. Hiragana in this case are prefixes, endings and various suffixes, and katakana are separately highlighted words of non-Japaneseorigin.
Japanese Grammar: Features of Tenses
In Japanese, there are only past and present-future tenses. As such, there is no form of the future tense. To indicate actions or events that have not yet happened, marker words are used: "in an hour," "tomorrow afternoon," "next month," "one year later," and so on. The sentence is written or spoken in the present tense. The use of marker words is mandatory, since their absence will make it difficult to understand the general meaning of what was said.
Sentences that talk about future actions or events begin with an exact or approximate time (day, week, month, year) and end with a predicate in the present tense.
Japanese Phonetics
The whole phonetic paradigm is built on five vowels (a, i, y, e, o), which form syllables with consonants (k, s, t, n, m, p, x). There are only five variants of syllables in each row. The exception is the consonant "n", as well as "o" in the accusative case, the syllables "va", "ya", "yu", "yo".
If you ignore the kanji and focus solely on the study of spoken language, the grammar of the Japanese language will seem very simple. It does not have an emphasis on tones and stress, as in Chinese, there are no sounds that are difficult to pronounce. It is much easier for Russian-speaking students to get used to the phonetic system of Japaneselanguage than English. The latter often experience problems with the articulation of certain phrases.
