An Introduction to Japanese Particles

Introduction

Japanese particles (in Japanese: Joshi (助詞) are suffixes that indicate the grammatical relationship between words in a sentence.

They are written in hiragana and placed after the word they modify.

These words can be a noun, a verb, an adjective, or a sentence.

The Japanese language has many different types of particles, each with its unique function.

Here will follow some of the most important ones:

• は - Used to mark the topic of a sentence.
• が - Used to mark the subject of a sentence.
• を - Used to mark the direct object of a sentence.
• に - Used to mark the location or a destination.
• で - Used to mark the location where an action takes place.
• と - Used to create a connection between two nouns.
• へ - Used to mark the direction of movement towards a destination.
• も - Used to indicate 'also' or 'too' when added to the end of a word.