Japanese grammar for beginners to learn the language seems simple. It is certainly many times easier than in Russian, English or German. There is no change in persons and numbers, and there is no female or middle gender. Unusual for us, but difficulties with these fundamentals arise only at first.
For a complete understanding of spoken language, it is enough to remember about three hundred popular constructions. This is a clear indicator of how elementary the grammar of the Japanese language is.
The biggest difficulty to be faced at first will be the unusual order of words in a sentence.
Proposal structure
The subject is always at the beginning of the sentence (precedes the predicate), and the predicate is only at the end of the sentence (or before the respectful bunch of desu in a formal style). Service words are written after the significant word, and secondary members of the sentence are written before the main ones. The word order always remains clear and unchanged.
Contextual words, ligaments and particles are often omitted (both in spoken and written language). Even the predicate or the subject can be omitted if this does not affect the general meaning of the sentence.
Writing structure
Japanese language consists of a combination of three scripts. They are closely intertwined, so knowledge of each of them is necessary.
Hieroglyphs are not just a collection of pictures. They obey certain laws, are formed into groups. Simple hieroglyphs are usually part of more complex ones. The meaning of a complex character can sometimes be understood from the meaning of its simple components.
Since hieroglyphs (kanji) were adopted from the Chinese in the sixth century, the Japanese had to add endings, particles and conjugation forms to them in order to adapt them to Japanese stress, morphology and syntax. To write them, the hiragana syllabic alphabet is used, in which all words of original Japanese origin are registered. Hiragana can also be used to read hieroglyphs, particles and endings (okurigans), complex kanji. The Japanese, who study their native language in educational institutions or on their own, use hiragana for explanatory signatures.
The Katakana alphabet was created for writing borrowed words, terms, geographical and topographical names, nicknames, first names and surnames of foreigners. Less commonly, it performs a function similar to Russian italics.
In almost every sentence, Japanese grammar closely links all three types of writing.
The hieroglyph is an analogue of the root of the word in Russian. Hiragana in this case is prefixes, endings and different suffixes, and katakana are separate words of non-Japanese origin.
Grammar of the Japanese: features of the times
In Japanese, only past and present-future tenses exist. As such, there is no future tense. To indicate actions or events that have not yet occurred, marker words are used: “in an hour”, “tomorrow afternoon”, “next month”, “a year later” and so on. The sentence is recorded or pronounced in the present tense. The use of marker words is necessary, since their absence will make it difficult to understand the general meaning of what has been said.
Proposals that speak of future actions or events begin with an indication of the exact or approximate time (day, week, month, year), and end with a predicate in the form of the present time.
Japanese Phonetics
The whole phonetic paradigm is built on five vowels (a, u, y, e, o), which form syllables with consonants (k, s, t, n, m, p, x). In each row there are only five syllable options. The exception is the consonant "n", as well as the "o" accusative case, the syllables "wa", "ya", "yu", "yo".
If you do not take into account the hieroglyphs and focus solely on the study of colloquial speech, the Japanese grammar will seem very simple. There is no emphasis on tones and stresses, as in Chinese, there are no sounds difficult to pronounce. Russian-speaking students are much easier to get used to the phonetic system of the Japanese language than English-speaking. The latter often experience problems with articulation of certain phrases.