Beginner Grammar - SuggestionsLesson 04 pdf notes

In the first lesson, we said you don’t need to memorize a bunch of complicated rules, but it looks like we gave them to you anyways…

Well the secret is to stop trying to memorize and start letting it absorb naturally.

In the last lesson, we learned the negative forms for: polite and casual, present tense and past tense.We also covered two verbs, to eat and to like.

We also learned Japanese doesn’t put words between spaces (but we will continue to do so).

This is our roadmap on Japanese, you can see we’ve covered 3 basic forms of language.

Today, we cover making suggestions.

Recall that “I don’t eat oranges” is “orenji wo tabenai”

For the casual form, offering someone to eat oranges just requires a question mark and a question inflection. This is because we often use the negative form to make suggestions or offers.

The negative form is used because it is considered indirect, which is more polite. It’s like “won’t you go with me to the dance” sounds nicer than “will you go with me to the dance.”

The polite form will require adding the question marker か (ka) in addition to the negative form. You can use か (ka) with the casual form as well but it’s not necessary.

Like English, you can also ask questions in the polite form, and it will take on a different meaning.

This is what we have thus far – the negative and the positive form of asking questions.

The casual form also can use の (no) as a question marker. However, this may create a different idiomatic expression. For example, it makes the casual form mean “you don’t eat oranges?”

In this chart, we see the conjugations for the verb “suki” – to like. The first one takes on the meaning “don’t you like oranges?”

The positive form has the expected meaning of “do you like oranges?”

We’re going to go over one last verb – drink. This is the conjugations for “to drink” – 飲む (nomu).Orange juice is オレンジジュース (orenji juu-su)

The negative forms (top) are as shown. Notice that they still use the ない (nai) and ません (masen) endings.

Adding in the question markers will give the same meanings as “I eat oranges.”

Here are some vocabulary words and phrases for today’s examples.

This is the first part of the first sentence. It has a verb and object and is actually a sentence by itself, except that the verb is constructed with a て (te) ending, which means the sentence is probably not complete.

The second part of the sentence by itself would mean “Won’t you search for Higashida’s whereabouts?” Higashida is the name of a person in this show.

The て ending on the first verb actually combines these two sentences to mean “Wont you combine powers, and search for Higashida’s whereabouts.”

The next scene is from the popular show “Shingeki no Kyojin.” There is a clause in this sentence that uses the の (no) particle which combines words. It’s used as a possession particle. So this is literally “Mother’s words.”

There is another particle の (no) at the end of the sentence that acts as a question marker instead of a possession particle. All this will be covered in further detail in further lessons. This is an informal example of asking questions.

Here is a review of today’s lesson.