To: Sans-Culotte
As a native English speaker the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure was implicitly understood. When I took a dive into Welsh, I discovered it is VSO. Gaelic is also VSO. Japanese is more "flexible" inserting "particles" to mark the part of the sentence structure. Nihongo ga wakari masu ka breaks out as subject Nihongo (the Japanese language) "ga" marks the subject. wakari masu translates as "understand". "ka" is the question particle. The whole phrase means "do you understand the Japanese language?". I'm a rank beginner in Japanese. Still sorting through hiragana to amuse myself reading the wallpaper at the local sushi shop. It also has some complex kanji that is way beyond my level of experience.
67 posted on
06/27/2022 11:28:23 AM PDT by
Myrddin
To: Myrddin
I seem to remember wakari masu from reading ShÅgun back in the late 70's.
68 posted on
06/27/2022 11:38:29 AM PDT by
Sans-Culotte
(11/3-11/4/2020 - The USA became a banana republic.)
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson