Ch 1 · Lesson 6Japanese · Chapter 1 · Lesson 6 · Grammar primer
は and です: the Japanese sentence
X Y is half of everything you will say for the first month. Add and it is a question.
The short version
。
Why?Hide
When marks the topic of a sentence it is pronounced wa, not ha. It is a spelling fossil from older Japanese, and it is the one exception every learner meets on day one. Everywhere else, is still ha.
Add
。、。
Why?Hide
A Japanese question is the statement with on the end. No change of word order, no extra verb: (I am a student) becomes (are you a student?). Your voice rises a little on the .
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 20 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
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Lesson 6 of 29 in this chapter