Select languages...
How Japanese packages meaning
Japanese grammar at a glance
Select a language above to see its architecture overview.
Common questions about Japanese
What do Japanese particles do?
Particles are short suffixes after each noun marking its grammatical role: は (topic), が (subject), を (direct object), に (destination/recipient), で (location/means), から (origin). Because particles identify role, word order is flexible — '猫が魚を食べた' (cat ate fish) and '魚を猫が食べた' (the fish, the cat ate) carry the same proposition.
Why are there so many ways to say 'I' and 'you' in Japanese?
Pronouns aren't a fixed set — they encode social relationship. 私 (formal), 僕 (casual male), 俺 (rough male), わたし (general polite), あたし (feminine casual) all mean 'I'. 'You' has 君, おまえ, あなた with different intimacy and social weight. Choosing wrong sounds loud. Most speakers drop pronouns when context allows.
Is Japanese SOV or SVO?
SOV. '猫が魚を食べた' = 'cat fish ate'. The verb always sits at the end of the clause, no exceptions. Modifiers, including relative clauses, precede their head noun. The whole language runs head-final: postpositions instead of prepositions, auxiliary after verb, possessor before possessed.
Does Japanese have a future tense?
No future tense — the verb only distinguishes past from non-past. 食べる (eat) covers both 'I eat' and 'I will eat'; context or time words like 明日 (tomorrow) tell you which. The completed/non-completed contrast is what's marked, not the temporal axis.
Why doesn't Japanese have plurals?
Japanese nouns don't change for number. 本 means 'book' or 'books' depending on context. Counters and quantifiers (三冊の本, three CL book) do the work when needed. Pronouns can take ~たち for plural (私 → 私たち), and a handful of human nouns mark plural with ~ら or reduplication (人々 'people'), but most nouns stay invariant.
Sources for Japanese
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Shibatani, Masayoshi (1990). The Languages of Japan. Cambridge University Press.
- Tsujimura, Natsuko (2014). An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics, 3rd ed. Wiley-Blackwell.
- Makino, Seiichi & Tsutsui, Michio (1986). A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. Tokyo: The Japan Times.
- Makino, Seiichi & Tsutsui, Michio (1995). A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar. Tokyo: The Japan Times.
- Kuno, Susumu (1973). The Structure of the Japanese Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Hinds, John (1986). Japanese: Descriptive Grammar. London: Croom Helm.