Grammar

Japanese sentence breakdown

By Mariano Matayoshi · building Wakatta, still learning Japanese

If you know every word in a Japanese sentence and still have no idea what it means, nothing is wrong with your vocabulary. Japanese carries meaning in the particles and the verb ending, not in the nouns — so the parts you skipped over are the parts that were doing the work. Here is the order to read a sentence in, and what to look for at each step.

This happens most often while listening, because a sentence arrives once, at speed, and is gone. The technique below is what to do with it afterwards — and at the end, the fastest way to get a specific line explained without leaving the episode.

Read it in the right order

English assembles meaning left to right. Japanese does not. A Japanese sentence resolves from the outside in, and reading it in written order is the single most common reason a sentence stays opaque.

1. Go to the end first

The verb lives at the end, and its ending decides an enormous amount: whether this happened or did not, whether it is polite or blunt, whether it is a statement, a request, an invitation or a guess. Read the last two syllables before you read anything else and you already know the shape of the sentence.

2. Find は and you have the topic

Whatever comes before は is what the sentence is about. Crucially, the topic is often not restated — it was established two sentences ago and everyone has simply kept it in mind. If a sentence has no は at all, the topic is almost certainly still the previous one.

3. Read the particles as roles, not as words

が marks who is doing it. を marks what is being done to. に points at a destination, a recipient or a time. で gives the place it happened or the means it happened by. The nouns are the cast; the particles are the plot. Swap は and が in the same sentence and the emphasis moves even though every word is identical.

4. Unstack the verb ending

Japanese verb endings stack, and they stack in a fixed order, so a long one is not a word to memorise but a sequence to peel. 食(た)べさせられたくなかった is a single verb carrying: make someone do it, have it done to you, want to, not, and past. Taken from the end backwards it reads "did not want to be made to eat" — which is intimidating as a block and trivial as a sequence.

5. Work out what was left out

Japanese omits anything inferable, and "I" and "you" are almost always inferable. A sentence that appears to be missing its subject is not broken; the subject is whoever is obvious. Beginners often read an omitted subject as an omitted word and go hunting for vocabulary that was never there.

A worked example

明日(あした)は　友(とも)だちと　映画(えいが)を　見(み)に　行(い)くつもりだったんだけど。

Assembled: "I was planning to go and see a film with a friend tomorrow, but…" — and the speaker never says what the "but" was, because the けど already said it. Every word here is N5 vocabulary. The meaning is entirely in the parts most learners read past.

When you want one sentence explained, now

The method above works, and it is worth learning because it makes you independent. But in the middle of an episode, with one line you did not catch, what you want is an answer rather than an exercise.

That is what Explain is for in Wakatta. Ask it about the line you are on and it comes back the way this page does: a natural translation first, then one bullet for each piece of grammar carrying the meaning — the particles, the verb ending with its dictionary form, the set expressions — and a closing note on register when it changes how the sentence lands. Written in your language, and you can replay the line right from the sheet.

And if a sentence goes past while your hands are busy, one tap marks the sentence you just heard and it waits for you in Learn, already explained.

Stop re-reading the sentence. Ask it.

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