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Lesson 1: The Core Sentence

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Hello everyone! My name is Cure Dolly and I am here to teach you Organic Japanese. What is Organic Japanese? It is Japanese pure and simple, with no harmful additives.

Japanese is the simplest, the most logical, the most easily understandable language that I have ever encountered, much easier than Western languages. But you wouldn't know that if you try to learn it from Western textbooks or Japanese learning websites.

Why not? Because they don't teach Japanese structure. They teach English structure and then try to force Japanese into it. And it doesn't fit, and it doesn't work very well.

That is the main reason, I think, why so many people give up Japanese. The Western system makes it seem complicated, full of strange exceptions and odd rules that you have to memorize. And none of this is true if you learn the language the way it really is.

So, this course is not just for people beginning Japanese. It's very good for those people. This is the best way to start. But if you've been learning Japanese for a while and you find yourself getting confused by things, it would be very good to go thorugh this series and learn from the start the way Japanese should have been explained in the first place.

All right, let's get started.

The most basic thing about Japanese is the Japanese core sentence. Every Japanese sentence is fundamentally the same. It has the same core. What does it look like? It looks like this.

We're going to picture it as a train. Every Japanese sentence has these two elements: A and B. The main carriage and the engine.

The engine is what makes the sentence move, what makes it work.

The carriage has to be there because without the carriage there's nothing for the engine to move.

Those two things are the core of every Japanese sentence. And if you can understand this, you can understand every sentence, no matter how complicated it becomes.

Later on we'll have a lot more carriages. We can say more about A. We can say more about B. We can combine logical sentences together to make complex sentences. But every Japanese sentence conforms to this basic type.

So, what are A and B?

Let's begin by reminding ourselves that in any language whatever there are only two kinds of sentence. And they are A is B sentences and A does B sentences.

So an A does B sentence is "Sakura walks".

An A is B sentence is "Sakura is Japanese".

And we can put these into the past tense; we can put them in the negative; we can turn them into questions; we can say more about A; we can say more about B. But, ultimately, every sentence boils down to one of these: an A is B or an A does B sentence.

So let's look at how we do this in Japanese.

In Japanese, if we want to say "Sakura walks" (A does B: Sakura walks), then A is Sakura, the main carriage, and B is walks, the thing she does, the engine of the sentence.

The name Sakura is often written as 桜 [さくら] and "walk" is 歩く [あるく].

And we need one more thing to make the core Japanese sentence. And that is the linchpin of every sentence, and it's が

Now I want you to make friends with が, because this is the center of Japanese grammar. Every Japanese sentence revolves around が. And one of the reasons that Japanese gets so confusing the way it's taught in the textbooks is that they don't properly explain this.

In some sentences we're not going to be able to see the が, but it's always there, and it's always doing the same job. That may sound a little complicated, but it isn't. It's very simple, and I'm going to explain that in the next lesson. For now, let's just stick with the very simplest kind of sentence.

So here is が. It looks like a post with a big hook on it, doesn't it? It links together A and B and turns them into a sentence. [Note: This is just a mnemonic for remembering what it does in the sentence, not an actual etymology.]

So, our core A does B sentence is:

桜 が 歩く
"Sakura walks".

Now let's take an A is B sentence: "Sakura is Japanese", or, as we say, "Sakura is a Japanese person".

So, A again is Sakura, B is 日本人 [にほんじん], which means Japanese person, and once again we need が to link them together.

So we're going to picture the A car, the main carriage, with a が on it, because the main carriage, the subject of the sentence, aways carries a が, to link it to the engine.

So, 桜 が 日本人 and we need one more thing.

There's one other thing that I want you to make friends with, and that's だ.

桜 が 日本人 だ
"Sakura is a Japanese person".

Now, you may have met this だ in its fancy form, です, but there are very good reasons for learning the plain, simple form first.

So, we're going to learn だ. Now if you look at だ, it's like an equals sign boxed off to the left. And this is a perfect mnemonic for what it does, because だ tells us that A is B. Why is it boxed off to the left? Because it only works one way.

Think about this logically:

桜 が 日本人 だ
Sakura = Japanese person.

But it doesn't work the other way:

Japanese people are Sakura - they're not all Sakura. Sakura is a Japanese person, but a Japanese person is not necessarily Sakura.

So now we have an A is B sentence and an A does B sentence.

There is one more form of the Japanese core sentence, for it has three forms. The third form is when we have a describing word, an adjective.

In Japanese, describing words end with い, just as they often do in English: happy, sunny, cloudy, silly. In Japanese it's just the same:

嬉しい [うれしい] "happy"
悲しい [かなしい] "sad"
青い [あおい] "blue" color

Now, we don't have to learn all these, but we do need to know about Japanese adjectives ending in い because they make the third kind of sentence.

So, let's take an easy one: ペン (that's a nice easy word because it means "pen")

ペン が 赤い
"pen is red"

Now, you notice that we don't have a だ on this sentence. Why is that?

Because the い-adjective, 赤い [あかい] - it doesn't just mean "red", it means "is-red".

The だ function, the equals function, is built into those い-adjectives.

So those are the three forms of Japanese sentence. They all start with the subject of the sentence, they're all connected with が, and they can end in three ways: with a verb, which will end in う, with the copula だ, or with an い because the last word is an adjective.

Ending Type of Sentence
う-Train
Verb
A does B
だ-Train
Noun + Copula
A is B
い-Train
Adjective
A is B

And now you know the basics of Japanese. And although this is very very basic, you already know some things that the textbooks never teach you, and you have already overcome one of the problems that makes Japanese get so very very complicated.

All right. Now, if you are learning Japanese for the first time, I'd like you to do a little homework. What I'd like you to do is to make some A does B and A is B sentences of your own.