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Japanese phrases, by meaning
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Common questions about Japanese
What does this Japanese page cover?
Twenty-two functional categories of meaning, with worked examples: tense and aspect (the plain non-past, the past in -ました/-た, the progressive in ている, the experiential in ことがある), modality (できる for ability, なければならない for must, ほしい for want), negation (ない suffixes for verbs, じゃない for nouns), questions with か, comparison with より, conditionals (たら, ば, と, なら), and 15 others. Every example shows kana and kanji, romaji, and a word-by-word gloss.
What's the difference between は and が?
が introduces new subjects or makes a focused contrast: 誰がきましたか? — 田中さんがきました. は marks the topic already established in the discourse, the thing being talked about: 田中さんは学生です 'as for Tanaka, he is a student'. The mismatch is what English collapses; Japanese keeps them separate. Examples on this page that contrast new versus topic information show how the choice flips.
How does the て-form work and why does it matter?
The て-form is one of the most-used verb shapes in Japanese: it chains actions (食べて寝た 'I ate and slept'), forms requests (来てください 'please come'), builds the progressive (食べている 'eating'), and links into many compound expressions (してもいい 'may do', しないでください 'please don't'). Many advanced grammar points are just the て-form plus another piece. This page surfaces the て-form everywhere it actually fires.
How does Japanese handle politeness levels?
By the verb ending. Plain forms (食べる, 食べた, 食べない) are used among friends, family, and in writing. Polite forms (食べます, 食べました, 食べません) are used with strangers, in service contexts, and at work. A separate honorific layer (お食べになる, めしあがる) raises status of the subject. Phrases on this page lean polite by default and note the plain form when context shifts.
Do I need to read kanji to follow along?
No. Every example shows kana, kanji, a romaji transliteration, and a word-by-word gloss. The same kanji recur across examples (人, 行, 食, 来), so passive recognition builds naturally. If you can read just hiragana the page is fully usable.
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.