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Japanese grammar wheels
Grammar Wheels
"I gave my three books to her at the market." — Change any wheels to see how Japanese encodes each shift.
Common questions about Japanese
What can I toggle on the Japanese wheel?
Subject, tense (past, non-past), aspect (simple, -ている progressive, -てしまった perfect), mood (declarative, question, command), polarity, voice (active, -られる passive), evidentiality (firsthand, そうだ hearsay, らしい inference, ようだ appearance), focus (neutral, は topic, cleft), and a five-step register dial. Each spin rebuilds the verb in kana and kanji with romaji.
How does the five-level register dial work?
The dial moves through plain (だ / る), polite (です / ます), humble (謙譲語), honorific (尊敬語), and formal (最敬体). The verb ending and often the verb itself change at each level — 食べる, 食べます, いただく, 召し上がる are all the same action at four registers.
What does the evidentiality dial do?
Switching evidentiality marks how the speaker knows what they are saying. そうだ adds hearsay, らしい marks inference from evidence, ようだ marks appearance, and the firsthand setting leaves no marker. The verb stem stays the same; the suffix changes.
What's the difference between は and が on the focus dial?
The neutral focus setting uses が to mark a plain subject. Topic-fronted promotes the relevant noun with は. The cleft setting wraps the focused element in 〜のは〜だ. Each option carries a different information-structure reading and the wheel reorders the sentence accordingly.
Can I use the wheel without reading kanji?
Each generated sentence shows kanji and kana, a romaji transliteration, a word-by-word gloss, and an English translation. The same characters reappear under each spin so the script becomes familiar over time.
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.