Japanese-Sentence Structure

[limsta]

This is for people who are interested in learning Japanese or are learning Japanese or if you are one of those people who like to look around a lot. The sentence structure for Japanese can be hard to get the hang of because it's a little different if comparing with English. English structure is Subject-Verb-Object (Sorry might be incorrect) however if it's Japanese it's different. The structure for Japanese is Subject-Object-Verb. So if you were to say "I drink milk" if you put into the Japanese structure it would be "I milk drink". It can be very confusing when you are trying to say something at first but once you use it a lot you will get the hang of it. Hope this helped!

[AExAVF]

"I milk drink" is the direct English equivalent of "Watashi wa gyuunyuu wo nomimasu" / わたし は ぎゅうにゅう を のみます。 The Subject-Object-Verb pattern in the Japanese language can be tricky to master, so you'll need to have constant practice.  This is only the basic rule, and once I enroll in the next level of my Elementary Japanese classes, the S-O-V sentence structure will entirely change, as I will learn about complex sentence patterns.

[宇崎ちゃん]

It's true that Japanese is a SOV-language.
However, certain grammar can break this rule and if can easily become SOVV, SOVSV, SOVOV, SOOV, OSOV, OSV, etc., while you will most certainly end with a verb.

But you can't count on it too much, look at this:
のむ = to drink.
のみたい = want to drink (verb + object).
のんでください = please drink (verb + object).
のむはずです = should drink (verb + object + verb).
のんだらどうですか =　what if (they) drink? (verb + object + verb).

[linguaholic]

Just now, Blaveloper said:

It's true that Japanese is a SOV-language.
However, certain grammar can break this rule and if can easily become SOVV, SOVSV, SOVOV, SOOV, OSOV, OSV, etc., while you will most certainly end with a verb.

But you can't count on it too much, look at this:
のむ = to drink.
のみたい = want to drink (verb + object).
のんでください = please drink (verb + object).
のむはずです = should drink (verb + object + verb).
のんだらどうですか =　what if (they) drink? (verb + object + verb).

If you are interested in language structures, you might want to have a  look at WALS (Word atlas of language structures). It breaks all the languages down in terms of features (structures) and gives you a nice overview about word order features for more than 2000 languages :=) You should have a look at it. It's pretty cool.

 

http://wals.info/