Talk:Particles (Japanese)

• Participles are always written in hiragana.

This wouldn't be true for a telegram written all in katakana. Ha ha, just being technical.

I think what you really meant is that kanji is never used for particles. This actually leads to a more general point: that there are some ideas which cannot be expressed with kanji alone. For example, the tense of verbs is expressed with kanji: like (write) + shimash'ta => written. --Ed Poor ^Talk 06:47, 8 December 2008 (EST)

Pronunciation

Any other idiosyncrasies besides wa and o? These are very likely to trip up the beginner, so I'd like to find a place to collect and highlight them. If you ever try to transliterate from kana to romaji (or vice versa) you would have to know about these particles. Do I write wa and say ha? Or vice versa? Let's help our readers (your students) be clear on this. --Ed Poor ^Talk 06:54, 8 December 2008 (EST)

That is a good point - the only other one is "e", written as "he" (へ). We will have to keep a note of these little things as we go along, so we can tidy up the lose ends as we come across them. I will add notes for wa, o and e. --KotomiT^{ohayougozaimasu} 07:41, 8 December 2008 (EST)

Kana, kana?

Is it worth, do you think, adding the kana for each romaji example too, or will that over-complicate matters? --KotomiT^{ohayougozaimasu} 10:17, 8 December 2008 (EST)

At this point, I wouldn't worry about adding kana to this article. At some later date, we might go through all your work and transliterate all your romaji examples into kana. I wrote a computer program in Javascript to help with that; I uploaded it to Wikipedia somewhere. But there's no hurry, and I'm sure someone else has better software for this. --Ed Poor ^Talk 10:22, 8 December 2008 (EST)

Number of syllables

Are postpositions still called particles when they have two syllables? --Ed Poor ^Talk 13:51, 8 December 2008 (EST) lol. remember these are used by the same people who invented eating fish before they invented kitchens. --KotomiT^{ohayougozaimasu} 14:11, 8 December 2008 (EST)

Those crucial distinctions

Thank you, Jessica, for this distinction. One of the hardest things for me, when I was studying Japanese, was to know how to choose between particles. Many times, they seemed equivalent, but I kept getting marked wrong on tests. --Ed Poor ^Talk 06:51, 12 December 2008 (EST)

Thank you! The problem is, I have many books on going from Japanese to English, but exactly none on going from English to Japanese, so I am relying on my knowledge for comparison of the languages (plus, have you ever realised just how much you take the language you speak for granted when you start to analyse it?!), plus easy examples I can find online, so I hope I am getting the message across clearly. --KotomiT^{ohayougozaimasu} 07:14, 12 December 2008 (EST)