Sentence Structure

In English, sentences usually have the form subject-verb-object. Word order determines the meaning. That is how you know that Nakamura-san is doing the seeing and Shimada-san is the person being seen in this sentence:

Nakamura-san
subject
sees
verb
Shimada-san
object

In Japanese, the normal word order is subject-object-verb. In addition, Japanese uses particles, which are syllables that tell how a word is used. Here is the previous sentence in Hiragana, with the particles in large red type:

nakamurasanga shimadasanwo mimasuza
subject object verb

Let’s start with two particles, ga and ha, that are so important that they deserve their own page.