Konnichi ha. Welcome to your very first Japanese Lesson. Normally, most Japanese tutorial and online lessons would give you a syllable and pronunciation guide on the first lesson but I have decided to start after this with numbers and basic vocabulary. But firstly, let me give you an understanding of Japanese.

Japanese is not that a complex language. It is nothing like English, Spanish or any other European languages, in the respect it originates from the Far East. The first thing any student or soon to be student of Japanese should learn is the word order. Now, to get your head round this is not an easy task.

Word Order

The Japanese word order is completely different to the English word order, which is that everything is swapped around.

English is an S-V-O language, which stands for Subject-Verb-Object. It means basically, that the subject comes first, the verb second and the object comes last.
Japanese is an S-O-V language, which stands for Subject-Object-Verb. This means that the verb is the last thing said in a sentence. Here are examples of both these style of sentences:

I speak Japanese - simple English sentence
I Japanese speak - Japanese way of saying above sentence, written in English

Here you can see that "speak", which is the verb in the sentence, comes at the end. This written in Japanese would look like this:

Watashi ha Nihongo wo hanasu
I (topic marker) Japanese (object marker) speak

This is a difficult concept to grasp, and you probably won't understand it. Japanese is a strange language and you will find it has many strange expressions and rules but just accept them.

So, to put a sentence together you need to remember this rule. The verb will ALWAYS be the last thing in a sentence. Occasionally, you might see an odd word or such at the end but we will come to that later on. Now, let's look at some basic vocabulary, in which you don't need to know sentence rules to say!

Basic Greetings and Vocabulary

Here are just a few words to get you started on your Japanese studies. Please re-read the sentence rules and structure, as it is very important you understand where everything goes.

Join us next lesson when we will look at:

·        Numbers

·        Verbs

Thank you and please join us next time. Mata ne~