Japanese sentence structure is easy!

(NOTE: This article is for anyone at any level of Japanese study. Even if you can already construct sentences, read this all the way through, and you may find that your understanding of sentence structure is better! It assumes that you already know about things like particles and words, but even a beginner who doesn't know anything yet can read this, too, because it will help you have the right mindset when you start putting your first sentences together...)

I have seen countless articles state that Japanese grammar is difficult for speakers of English to learn, and I certainly have heard my share of students complaining about it. While I will admit that it's quite different from English, and thusly baffling at first, it's actually extremely simple and structured, and anyone can do it!

In fact, if you can do simple algebra, you have all the logical competence needed to fully understand Japanese sentence structure. So if I ask you "2 plus what makes 7?" and you're able to tell me the answer is "5," then you're smart enough to understand Japanese sentences just like a native!

Japanese sentence structure can look really daunting when you see it listed in textbooks and reference sites. It looks very complicated and it seems like you have to learn a huge list of rules and this and that before you can really understand what you're doing.

But that's not true! You can understand Japanese sentence structure with just a few simple concepts. Hopefully that by reading this article, though it may get a bit wordy, you'll be able to realize how simple and easy Japanese grammar and sentence structure really is, even for you, and you'll be well on your way to having a much more solid foundation and understanding of the Japanese language.

So why does it seem so difficult for so many students? I think because so many people are thinking about it in the wrong way. A lot of people try to think of foreign languages as some kind of "code," in which you take the rules of your own language and twist them to make a new one, substituting out words and parts while altering the parts where the rules are different. This is confusing, and, well, stupid.

Instead, let's think of Japanese as its own unique world that has nothing to do with English. Forget "verb this" and "adjective that" and Japanese sentences are made with these simple steps:

1. Start with a core.
2. Tack whatever stuff onto it you need.
3. You're done!!

Now, you're probably thinking, "What?! It is not that simple!" Well, my friends, I am not tricking you! That's really all there is to it. Let's take a look at what makes each step:

STEP ONE: START WITH A CORE

All Japanese sentences revolve around a single core. In fact, this "core" by itself is a complete, full, proper sentence in Japanese.

Let's take a look at some of these cores that are commonly heard as a sentence:

分かりました wakarimasita/wakarimashita

Now, you probably have heard people say this before. It often translates to "Understood." and you pretty much say it to say that you've understood something you've been told, especially directions or commands or instructions or things like that. By itself, this single word is a complete sentence!

Let's look at another:

いい？ ii?

You should have come across this before. You can use this to ask people if something is all right with them. Often this can be translated as "Are you sure?" "Is it okay?" "How is this?" etc. (depending on the situation). It's usually pretty easy to understand when it's used. Even though it's just one word, this is a complete and proper Japanese sentence!

Here's one more:

駄目だ！ dame da!

Now, depending on your definition of "word," you could say this is two words, or you could say it is a word and the copula, or you could even consider the word+copula combo to be a single "word." When talking about Japanese, some people consider the copula a word and some don't. Whether you do or not, this is still pretty simple for a sentence. It's translated as things like "It's no use!" "It's broken!" "This doesn't work!" "That's no good!" "This is bad!" etc. etc. etc. depending on the situation. Anyway, this simple phrase is on its own a complete sentence in Japanese.

Now, why am I saying all this?

That's really all you need to make a Japanese sentence are these simple phrases and words. At the heart of every Japanese sentence, you will find one of these phrases. There are only three types of words that can be used as these "cores," and every sentence has one.

These "cores" can be called a variety of things, such as a "predicate" (that's what I hear used the most, it's also the term used in many textbooks like JSL), but it's usually not made clear exactly how important or simple it really is to have these predicates or cores.

And that's all you really need to make a sentence in Japanese. It's especially important to understand that this "core" is here, and it's the driving point of the sentence. Now, you probably want to make more complicated sentences than single words sometimes, so we go to the next step...

STEP TWO: TACK STUFF ON!

After you have established your core/predicate, you just have to tack stuff onto it to make it into what you want. The core part goes at the end, and you build onto it from the beginning. Let's use something to my first example earlier. (The first romanization is literal to the characters, the second is closer to Hepburn, if it differs.)

分かる
wakaru

This sentence simply refers to some kind of "understanding." Depending on the situation, it could mean different things, but for example, if someone asked you if you could understand Japanese, you could answer with wakaru to mean "I understand it." That part alone is a core.

Now, in different situations, we can use this same core to build other sentences.

日本語が分かる
nihongo ga wakaru

Now, all we did was tack on 日本語が nihongo ga. This just makes it more specific to what are core is talking about. Now instead of just saying "I understand," we're saying "I understand Japanese." So in a situation where someone asked "Do you understand any foreign languages?" we could answer this.

Now, I'm not telling you how to use individual particles here, because this is just about the structure of sentences in general. But you always just take the phrase you want and put the particle after it. So if you want to say which language is being understood (which uses particle ga) you just take the language and then put ga after it. Nihongo ga. Pretty simple, right?

So you're pretty much taking a word or phrase and putting the particle after it and making it into a little mini phrase. You can call this a particle phrase or particle set or something (it doesn't really matter what you call it, just know its is its own little phrase).

To make a sentence, all you do is take as many of these little phrases that you need and tack them on to the beginning of the sentence and then throw the core in at the end. All of the phrases will explain what the core is talking about.

So let's say someone asked "Does anyone in here understand any foreign languages?" to a group of people in a room, and you wanted to reply that you understand Japanese. In this case, we will need to specify that you are talking about yourself and not the other people, so we're going to tack on another little phrase that specifies that the wakaru is talking about "self":

私は日本語が分かる
watasi ha nihongo ga wakaru
watashi wa nihongo ga wakaru

Notice that the core, wakaru is still at the end, because we're talking about something being understood. All we did was tack on two things, nihongo ga which says that Japanese is the thing being understood, and now watashi wa which says that "I" am the person that understands.

Of course, not all of our little phrases have to take particles. There are other special phrases that don't use any particles. So like if we want to say that we only understand a little, we can use another phrase...

私は日本語が少し分かる
watasi ha nihongo ga sukosi wakaru
watashi wa nihongo ga sukoshi wakaru

There are plenty of little words and phrases that can modify your core even further. Sukoshi here just says that the understanding is little. When you're using phrases that don't use particles like this, they almost always go right before your core part. But that's something that's easy to pick up.

You can just keep adding all kinds of phrases to clarify your core more and more. You could put a thousand phrases in there if you wanted to. It's good to think of each as little phrases, with a core at the end. Thinking of it that way, all sentences in Japanese are essentially this:

phrase phrase phrase phrase phrase phrase core.

Of course, the number of phrases is up to you. It can be as little as zero (just a core) or as many as over 9000. Seriously, it's just phrases and then a core. That's really easy!!

Trying to think of it like English with words mixed up (so many times I hear people trying to reason it out by saying an English sentence in a weird order like "Tuesday on Mary did John to flowers gave!") is counterproductive and frankly pretty dumb. I mean, read what I just wrote. Doesn't that sound dumb??

You don't want to think of it as some weird set order that's like English but mixed up. It's just phrases and then a core. The phrases give more information about what the core is talking about. Simple!!

In fact, if we're talking about the previous "example" of Mary giving John a present of flowers on Tuesday, think of it like this: What is your core? What is the key action or description you want to describe? You're talking about the giving of a present, right? So your core is going to be giving. The main point of this sentence is to talk about giving. This will often line up with your "main verb" in English, but it's best not to think about Japanese sentences as translations of English ones, but as their own sentences.

So your core is "give." Now, if you just say "Gave!" no one is going to know what you're talking about, so you need to tack on phrases that describe it more. Right now, we just have this:

あげた
ageta

So we know something was given. So now we just need to add details. What was given?

お花をあげた
ohana wo ageta
ohana o ageta

Now we know that flowers (ohana) were the thing that were given. We just tacked on a particle phrase with the thing that was given and the particle we needed. That's great, but we want want more details. How about who is doing this giving?

マリーがお花をあげた
marii ga ohana wo ageta
marii ga ohana o ageta

Yup, same thing. Tacked on a phrase. Now we know Mary did the giving. MORE DETAILS!

ジョンにマリーがお花をあげた
zyon ni marii ga ohana wo ageta
jon ni marii ga ohana o ageta

Yeah, tacked on another phrase. This one says that John is the one who was the recipient of giving. Now we know Mary gave some flowers to John. What's our last detail? You got it...

火曜日にジョンにマリーがお花をあげた
kayoubi ni zyon ni marii ga ohana wo ageta
kayoubi ni jon ni marii ga ohana o ageta

Seems redundant, right? That's because it probably is really easy to you right now. You just add stuff before the core. Simple!! Now, you may be wondering, "How do I know what order to put all that stuff before the core?!"

Well, here's a little secret: Word order is not nearly as strict as in English! In English, the word order is very important because that's how we tell the relationship between the words. In the English sentence "Mary gave John flowers." we know that Mary gave the flowers and John received them because Mary comes first and John comes after the "gave" part. But in Japanese, that's not the case.

Remember how we're making all these little particle phrases? Those particles themselves tell us how the phrases connect to the core. When we say marii ga somewhere in our sentence, that ga particle tells us that marii (Mary) is the one who is doing the giving. No matter where we put it in the sentence, it's still going to mean the same thing.

This is why it's good to think of each particle phrase as its own little phrase. In order to figure out what a sentence means, you can look at each little phrase, then look at the core. The particle tells you how the phrase relates to the core. The phrases always relate to the core. So don't get so worried about having a strict order, because those particles just link up to the core.

Now, there are particles that link phrases to other phrases to make a more complicated phrase (like 隣の人 tonari no hito; here the 'no' is linking tonari and hito to make the single phrase tonari no hito). But if you're studying properly, it should be easy to realize which particles do this because their only function is to stick words together like that.

Anyway, let's look at our example again, and separate all the little phrases.

[火曜日に] [ジョンに] [マリーが] [お花を] あげた
[kayoubi ni] [zyon ni] [marii ga] [ohana wo] ageta
[kayoubi ni] [jon ni] [marii ga] [ohana o] ageta

I put all of our phrases in brackets. The structure of this sentence is as follows:

phrase phrase phrase phrase core

Now, let's mix up our phrases.

[マリーが] [お花を] [ジョンに] [火曜日に] あげた
[marii ga] [ohana wo] [zyon ni] [kayoubi ni] ageta
[marii ga] [ohana o] [jon ni] [kayoubi ni] ageta

The structure of this sentence is:

phrase phrase phrase phrase core

And both sentences mean the same thing... Mary gave John some flowers on Tuesday. The order of the phrases does not change the meaning! The core is still there, so we know "gave" was what happened, and because of the particles, we know how each phrase relates to the core, so we can still know which phrase tells who gave, which tells who was given to, which tells when, and which tells what was given.

Now, I'm not saying word order doesn't matter at all. The emphasis can change slightly. Whatever you put first will sound slightly more important than the rest. In English, we emphasize with voice strength and pitch and stuff. In Japanese, word order can help you do this, too. But if you're not emphasizing anything in particular, the word order is pretty free. Sometimes certain things will sound more natural first, or sometimes you will need to use a certain order because you have ambiguous particles or something, but these are cases that, if you understand this simple phrase phrase core structure, you will be able to deal with when you encounter them pretty easily. The point of this article is to get you to understand how simple sentence structure really is in Japanese.

STEP THREE: YOU'RE DONE!!

Yup, that's it! You've now made your sentence. And guess what? You can make every sentence in Japanese in exactly the same way. The only thing that's really left is putting a "sentence particle" or "ending particle" at the end if you need to. There are particles you throw at the end of a sentence in order to change its meaning or nuance or something.

For example, the way to make a question in Japanese is just to put か ka at the end of your sentence. Using the example again, if we threw ka at the end of that flower-giving thing, we'd just end up with "Did Mary give John flowers on Tuesday?" Yup, that's all you have to do. There are other sentences particles that serve other functions, and you probably know them by now.

WAIT, THERE'S A CATCH I BET!

Okay, so you're ready for the big time and you want to make more complicated sentences, or you're having trouble understanding complex sentences in Japanese. It seems like you need to use more than one core, or that a sentence you're reading or hearing has many cores inside it. What's up with that?

Sentences can be made up of more than one sentence. We do this in English, as well, of course. There are a few ways that this happens. A simple one is when two sentences are put back to back and use some kind of conjunction. In Japanese we don't really have conjunctions like we do in English, but we have particles that can link up entire sentences.

For example, if we want to say "I'm studying mathematics, but I don't understand it very well." you could say something like this:

数学を勉強しているけど、よく分かりません
suuzigaku wo benkyousiteiru kedo, yoku wakarimasen
suujigaku o benkyoushiteiru kedo, yoku wakarimasen

This is pretty simple, and I think a lot of people wouldn't have trouble making a sentence like this. Basically we have two sentences, the first is 数学を勉強している suujigaku o benkyou shiteiru (phrase core) and the second is よく分かりません yoku wakarimasen (phrase core). We want to link the two together to make one big sentence, so we link them with kedo which means something like "but." Now we have one big sentence with two cores. Essentially this is just two sentences with two cores, and instead of saying them separately, we just said them with a connecting particle.

I think that's pretty easy though.

You can also link two sentences/cores through the use of -te forms. Like if you want to say that you went to the convenience store and bought some tea, you could say:

コンビに行って、お茶を買ってきた。

Because you want to talk about going (which you could use as a core) and buying (another core), you can use -te form of 行く to lead into the next part since the sentences are related. Note here that it's really just two sentences back to back like before, but instead of linking with a particle, you're using the -te form of your core (all three types of cores have a -te form) to show that the first core begins, exists, or describes something, and then the second core/sentence is somehow related. I'm not going to go into this much, because it's really its own subject, and this is more about simply understanding that the structure is still phrase phrase phrase phrase core, and in this case, you're just putting two sentences back to back. There are other forms of cores (like -reba form and stuff) that can connect sentences together as well. Hopefully here you can see here where the two sentences and cores are.

Anyway, these are still pretty simple sentences, and if you're reading this far because you're wanting to understand really complex sentences, you're probably saying "I know all this! This is easy!" (It is easy, isn't it!) then you're ready for the final note. This is really as complicated as sentence structure gets in Japanese, and you'll realize after I explain it that it's really not that hard or complicated after all:

You can use an entire sentence to describe a word or phrase, and make it into one big phrase. The hardest part is figuring out where these big phrases begin and end, but if you understand the structure I described so far, you should already know the answers. It just might take a second to think about it.

So let's look at an example of a phrase that shouldn't be too hard to understand:

日本語が分かる人
nihongo ga wakaru hito

Here we have an entire sentence, 日本語が分かる nihongo ga wakaru ("understand japanese"), that is followed by 人 hito, which means "person." By putting the core of the sentence directly before hito, that means that the sentence itself describes that hito. So this phrase itself means "person who understands Japanese."

Now lets say we want to say that Mary gave flowers (yay, flowers!) to the person who understands Japanese. Yeah, dumb example, but hey. Just like before, we're going to use that same old phrase phrase phrase phrase core stuff. Now, instead of saying that Mary gave John the flowers, we're going to take that big phrase we made and put it with the particle ni, just like we did with "John" before, and put it before our same old core of "gave" (ageru). So we end up with this:

日本語が分かる人にマリーがお花をあげた
nihongo ga wakaru hito ni marii ga ohana wo ageta
nihongo ga wakaru hito ni marii ga ohana o ageta

Yup. Does it seem confusing? Hopefully not, but if it does, think about how you got to that point. We still started with our core, ageta ("gave"), and we just tacked on phrases to give more details. Who gave? What was given? Who was it given to? We tacked all those things on. The most complicated part was that we used a bigger and more complicated phrase in there, because we had to say "the person who understands Japanese." (Maybe we saw her giving the flowers but couldn't remember that guy's name. Maybe John understands Japanese but we forgot his name...)

So let's look at it in this way:

[日本語が分かる人に] [マリーが] [お花を] あげた
[nihongo ga wakaru hito ni] [marii ga] [ohana wo] ageta
[nihongo ga wakaru hito ni] [marii ga] [ohana o] ageta

As you can see, the structure is again this:

phrase phrase phrase core.

Of course, one of the phrases is made up of an entire sentence that is describing hito, so that one phrase actually has its own little mini phrases and cores inside of it. But in the grand scheme of the sentence, that whole big string of words is given that one particle ni and just becomes one phrase that describes who was on the receiving end of our core, ageta.

Now, here's another tricky part... word order is starting to matter. If we threw other phrases at the beginning, they might get mixed up with that first core of wakaru that ended up modifying hito. So anything that's going to modify our main core should go after our mini-core that's part of that phrase. That way we don't think that it's part of the phrase, but instead connected to our core.

However, if you use particle は wa for something at the beginning, it lets you know it's connected to the entire sentence and the main core at the end. So if we said マリーは marii wa at the beginning (instead of marii ga) we would be fine, because we would know that Mary is related to the whole sentence and the main core, and we wouldn't get confused and think she was part of that wakaru phrase.

Now, I've been using "verbal" cores in my examples, but all of this stuff applies to cores that use "adjectival" and "nominal" stuff as well.

It's a bit much to chew, thinking about all this at once, and I know this was a bit long and wordy, but when you really think about it... all the sentences ended up just being phrase phrase phrase core, where all the phrases just explained how they were related to the core. That's pretty simple and easy, if you ask me. Sometimes it's just a lot of stacking and building, but it's not hard to figure out.

If you're reading or hearing a sentence, sometimes it can be harder to understand because you're not making the phrases yourself, so you might get confused figuring out where they begin and end.

Here's some tips to help you:

1. Listen/look for particles. Each particle constitutes a phrase. Know that when you hear or read a phrase, it's going to be describing some upcoming core.
2. When you get to the core, realize that all the phrases before it described that core in some way.
3. If that core ends up describing something (like the "person who understood Japanese" above) and then you hear another particle, realize that everything you've heard or read up to this point is one giant phrase, and now you're working toward another core with more phrases. If that's the case, restart from #1. If not, go on...
4. Think about all the phrases you just heard and how the particles told you they relate to the core. There's the meaning of your sentence!

It may sound difficult, but it's really easy. Thinking of sentences as nothing more than phrases that work together to describe a core, you will be able to understand Japanese sentence structure easily with just a bit of practice. Try to notice where phrases are and you will realize that every Japanese sentence is nothing more than phrase phrase phrase phrase core, and sentences back to back like that.

It was wordy, but hopefully if you read all the way through, you'll realize how simple Japanese sentence structure really is. Of course, you can stack up phrases and make complex phrases, but in the end, the basic structure is very easy, and it's just a matter of practice building "big" sentences. But just because a sentence is big doesn't mean it's difficult! It's still the same structure and should still be pretty simple if you can realize where the phrases and core are.

Also note that "core" is simply my word that I used here to describe it. You may hear it called other things like "predicate" other places, or often it will be called nothing at all (because people tend to analyze Japanese sentence structure in some pretty weird ways, especially because they can't get away from comparing it to English or thinking of it in an Englishy way).

Good luck with your Japanese studies and keep working hard! Parse away, my friends!