Today’s topic is a uniquely challenging one: prepositions in Japanese.<\/p>\n
We’re going to have to get familiar with flipping concepts around from how we generally understand them in English.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Japanese prepositions function similarly to English prepositions, but are in fact postpositions<\/i> and are placed after<\/i> the noun they are informing.<\/b><\/p>\n <\/h2>\n
Differences from English<\/h2>\n
I’m going to start by confusing you right off the bat. Just a heads up!<\/p>\n
So, prepositions are actually just one half of a grammatical concept known as adposition.<\/p>\n
The other half are known as postpositions<\/i>. See? Pre and post. One comes before, the other comes after.<\/p>\n
English almost exclusively uses pre<\/i>positions. Japanese, on the other hand, uses post<\/i>positions.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In English, we put the preposition before a noun to add information. These are words like “to, at, in, on, through, with,” etc.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
In Japanese<\/a><\/strong> this would look at little different (okay, a lot<\/i> different). Let’s compare.<\/p>\n First, we’ll need a few words:<\/p>\n I’m = 私は<\/p>\n eating = 食べてる<\/p>\n under = の下に<\/p>\n the table = テーブル<\/p>\n How this actually looks in Japanese<\/a><\/strong> is this:<\/p>\n 私はテーブルの下に食べてる。 So far we’ve learned that, unlike English, prepositions in Japanese come after<\/i> the noun.<\/p>\n Furthermore, what we normally call prepositions in English are actually spread out a bit across grammatical parts in Japanese<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n There are adverbs, particles, and more that end up taking on the role of preposition\/postposition in Japanese.<\/p>\n The Japanese word for preposition is 前置詞 (zenchishi<\/i>). This word is made up of the characters<\/a> <\/strong>meaning “before,” “placement,” and “part of speech,” respectively.<\/p>\n The Japanese word<\/a><\/strong> for postposition is 後置詞 (kochishi<\/i>). This word is almost the same as the previous one, except the first character is now the one which means “after.”<\/p>\n With regards to postpositional words, we should also cover the word for particles, 助詞 (joshi<\/i>), since many particles are in fact postpositions.<\/p>\n This word is also similar to the preceding ones, except it is only two characters long. The last character<\/a><\/strong> is the same, and the first character means “help, assist.”<\/p>\n Finally, if we want to talk about adposition (remember, that’s the word for both prepositions and<\/i> postpositions), we need to know 接置詞 (secchi-shi<\/i>).<\/p>\n
\nWatashi<\/a><\/strong> wa teburu-no-shita ni tabeteru.<\/p>\n <\/h2>\n
Some more details on Japanese prepositions<\/h2>\n
<\/h2>\n
Talking about prepositions in Japanese<\/h2>\n