The anatomy of Japanese sentences

When you approach the study of a new language, especially one like Japanese that does not use spaces to show word boundaries, your biggest source of confusion is going to be how to correctly separate the different parts of each sentence to more easily digest and understand them. We call this activity “parsing”.

No matter what, if you cannot “parse” a sentence, you will not understand its meaning. If you do not understand its meaning, you cannot acquire the language used in it. This lesson will give you a very brief and quick rundown of what to expect to achieve basic “parsing” abilities.

Japanese is an SOV language (Subject-Object-Verb), unlike English which is an SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) one.

English: I eat (an) apple
Japanese: I apple eat

It may seem weird at first, but you will get used to this “backwards” structure in no time as you get exposed to more and more language. Also, plenty of exceptions exist, this order is not a rule but a general recommendation.

Japanese has two general formations. Almost every sentence will be in the shape of “A is B” or “A does B”. Or, following Japanese order, “A B is” and “A B does”. We will see in the next lesson how to make “A B is” type sentences, and later we will learn “A B does” ones too. Then, we will learn how to connect and chain them together.

Another specific aspect of Japanese is that it is a pro-drop language. What this means is that anything that can be implied or understood from the context can be omitted. For example, if it is obvious who the subject is, we don’t need to state it again. “Apple eat” is a completely fine sentence, as long as we know the subject it refers to is “I”.

This is because Japanese is a “topic” driven language. Most Japanese conversations begin by setting the stage of what is being talked about, and then add more details with every new statement that relates back to the topic. When the focus shifts, we change the topic by raising a new one. Being able to identify and keep track of how the topic changes is fundamental to get a good “parse” on a sentence.

English: “I ate an apple then drank some water. What did you do?”   
Japanese: “About me, apple ate. Later, water drank. About you?”

It sounds like backwards caveman speak, but that’s just because representing Japanese structure in English is incredibly silly. This is the only example in the entire guide where we’ll be writing unnatural English as a comparison with Japanese. You should not think about Japanese this way. You need to think of Japanese in Japanese, because Japanese is not English.