Pronouns

Before we start making some basic sentences, let's learn some more new words. In this lesson, we are going to learn pronouns.

Pronouns are the part of speech that includes words such as you, they, somebody, anything and who; it is usually just a single word (occasionally two words in English) that form a Noun Phrase. This is known as a Pro-Noun Phrase, however, the less accurate term pronoun has already been established.

The most common pronouns are I, he, she, it, they and we. These are all known as personal pronouns since they take the place of a person or thing.

Japanese pronouns are quite different than in English. Personal pronouns refer to people, not things or ideas. Because of this, Japanese has no equivalent of "it" in that context. Here are some common pronouns used to describe people:

Politeness Levels

Before moving on to some more words to learn, I want to talk to you about "Politeness Levels". Unlike English, the Japanese language has different levels of formality.

Whenever you are being polite, you should use formal words or grammar when you are talking to people who are above you in rank such as teachers, employers, people older than you or those you look up to etc.

You don't always need to be polite though. If you are talking to friends, family, people of your age or younger, then you may use informal words.

Notice that "Me (female)" is atashi. You'll find that most girls will use the formal watashi instead of atashi. However, if you are a boy and speaking informally then you will commonly refer to yourself as boku. While girls may also use boku to appear more informal and attempt to act cute, there are even more informal ways for boys to refer to themselves but you should be able to pick those up when listening to real Japanese people speak.

In later lessons, we will show you other ways of referring to people as well as the use of other pronouns such as the possessive pronoun, interrogative pronoun and more. For now, we have given you some common words which we will use very soon to help you understand and construct basic sentences.

When you want to say something like "My ____.", this works out to "watashi no ____" in Japanese. We will learn more about the の particle in another lesson. In the examples below, the pronoun before の adds details about the main noun after it: