This is my attempt to give you the most concise Japanese lesson in the world. Today, we’ll go over how to express location and the basic structure of Japanese sentences.
To start with the main point — Japanese doesn’t have prepositions like English does. Instead, it uses a structure of “noun + particle” to build sentence segments, and then places the predicate at the end.
What looks like a “preposition” in English is expressed in Japanese through what we call case particles (格助詞). For example:
Destination → particle に
東京に行きます。 とうきょうにいきます。(Hiragana) Tōkyō ni ikimasu. (Romaji) I’m going to Tokyo. (English)
Place of action → particle で
ダブリンで英語を勉強します。
だぶりんでえいごをべんきょうします。(Hiragana)
Dabirin de eigo o benkyō shimasu. (Romaji)
I study English in Dublin. (English)
Starting time → particle から
6時から仕事をします。
ろくじからしごとをします。(Hiragana)
Roku-ji kara shigoto o shimasu. (Romaji)
I start work at six o’clock. (English)
Now, there’s an important point about words like 上 (ue – on/top), 下 (shita – under), 中 (naka – inside), and 外 (soto – outside). In Japanese, these aren’t prepositions — they’re actually nouns that describe position.
That’s why we say:
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