Japanese Prepositions in a Nutshell

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Today’s topic is a uniquely challenging one: prepositions in Japanese.

We’re going to have to get familiar with flipping concepts around from how we generally understand them in English.

I won’t lie: It’s a huge challenge at first, but after a handful of practice, without even noticing it, this new way of engaging with language will become second nature.

 

Japanese prepositions

Japanese prepositions function similarly to English prepositions, but are in fact postpositions and are placed after the noun they are informing.

 

Differences from English

I’m going to start by confusing you right off the bat. Just a heads up!

So, prepositions are actually just one half of a grammatical concept known as adposition.

The other half are known as postpositions. See? Pre and post. One comes before, the other comes after.

English almost exclusively uses prepositions. Japanese, on the other hand, uses postpositions.

That said, despite the difference in location, they operate pretty much the same way, so I’ll be referring to the whole concept as prepositions from here on out.

 

What are prepositions?

Prepositions are sort of like “helper” words. They help us add information, specifically by showing the relationship of nouns to the rest of a sentence.

In English, we put the preposition before a noun to add information. These are words like “to, at, in, on, through, with,” etc.

Let’s work with an example: “I’m eating under the table.” Here, the noun we’re adding to is “the table” and the preposition is “under.”

In Japanese this would look at little different (okay, a lot different). Let’s compare.

First, we’ll need a few words:

I’m = 私は

eating = 食べてる

under = の下に

the table = テーブル

How this actually looks in Japanese is this:

私はテーブルの下に食べてる。
Watashi wa teburu-no-shita ni tabeteru.

 

Some more details on Japanese prepositions

So far we’ve learned that, unlike English, prepositions in Japanese come after the noun.

Furthermore, what we normally call prepositions in English are actually spread out a bit across grammatical parts in Japanese.

There are adverbs, particles, and more that end up taking on the role of preposition/postposition in Japanese.

 

Talking about prepositions in Japanese

The Japanese word for preposition is 前置詞 (zenchishi). This word is made up of the characters meaning “before,” “placement,” and “part of speech,” respectively.

The Japanese word for postposition is 後置詞 (kochishi). This word is almost the same as the previous one, except the first character is now the one which means “after.”

With regards to postpositional words, we should also cover the word for particles, 助詞 (joshi), since many particles are in fact postpositions.

This word is also similar to the preceding ones, except it is only two characters long. The last character is the same, and the first character means “help, assist.”

Finally, if we want to talk about adposition (remember, that’s the word for both prepositions and postpositions), we need to know 接置詞 (secchi-shi).

Ah, yes, another familiar one. In this case, again only the first character has changed. Now we’re looking at the character for “touch, adjoin, piece together.”

 

List of Japanese Prepositions

 

How Japanese prepositions are used: examples