Learning Japanese - Day 10

Revising some thing I learned yesterday such as Masu and Masen - positive and negative ways of saying I will or IO wont. Apparently Japanese does not have a tense for future, so it can either mean Will or Am depending on the context.

Example - がっこうにいきます can mean either “I go to school” (present) or “I will go to school” (future) depending on the context of the sentence.

I found a great site that explains this (also where I got that example) -click here-

An example from what I learned yesterday:

Tabemasu

食べます

I am eating / I will eat

or to make that a negative you would change masu to masen

Tabemasen

食べません

Will not eat / don't want to eat

Past tense

Past tense verbs end in Mashita or Masendeshita - you can see that the positive version - Mashita is an all new word, but the negative past tense is the same as the negative present tense verb, Masen, just with deshita added onto the end of it.

so using the same example from above:

Tabemahsita

食べました

I ate

or to make it negative and past tense

Tabemasendeshita

食べませんでした

I didn't eat

As well as learning a bit more about grammar, I (maybe foolishly) tried to read a bit from one of the Japanese books I have lying around... I didn't get very far, getting stuck at the pronunciations of each and ever Kanji character I acme across. Luckily I've got a good app and found a good website for searching Kanji by Radical I could figure out the pronunciation and meaning!

Now I can read....... The front cover of a book!

そつと目を閉じて そこから始まる物語

Close your eyes, the story begins here.

#LearningJapanese