8 docs tagged with "grammar-fundamentals"

Dropped subjects in Japanese are the default, not an exception. Learn the pro-drop recoverability rule, what else gets omitted, and why わたし is often wrong.

How Japanese grammar works: the six pillars (topic-comment, SOV, head-final, agglutinative, pro-drop, particles) and the English categories Japanese skips.

Japanese word order in one principle: SOV, head-final modifiers, particles that free the order, and the scrambling rule that tells you what comes first.

Parts of speech in Japanese: the 10 hinshi classes from 名詞 to 助動詞, the independent vs dependent and inflectable axes, and the school-grammar split.

Polite vs. plain Japanese in one map: 丁寧体 and 普通体 as registers, 丁寧形 and 普通形 as verb shapes, where each fits, and why textbooks teach polite first.

Japanese copula explained: です, だ, and である as one paradigm graded by register, full conjugation across tense and negation, and why 'to be' misleads.

Topic vs. subject in Japanese: why は marks the topic, not the subject, how 象は鼻が長い splits the two, and how Japanese drops the topic once it's set.

は vs が in Japanese, sorted for beginners: the two jobs each particle does, the canonical 誰が…/…は… contrast pair, and the new-vs-old heuristic.