Places and Directions

Now that we've covered particles に, で and を that mark locations, let's follow with something a bit easier and learn some new words we can use with these particles. Remember to check out words like the ones in this lesson using an online dictionary such as japandict.com to hear the pitch accent and explore other Japanese content to see how they are used in real conversions.

By now, you should be quite familiar with Hiragana and Katakana so let's try learning these new words without any romaji. Don't worry if you can't read certain characters, just look at a kana chart and see what they are. The more you practice recognising them without romaji, the easier it'll become.

Places

When you arrive in Japan, simple phrases such as お手洗いはどこにですか (where are the toilets) or 駅はどこにですか (where is the train station) are very important and useful. Now, instead of those little holiday phrase books, you should be able to make your own sentences and questions, try it out.

Being able to create your sentences is a good sign that you are learning, if not, try to go back to the lessons you are not sure about and try to search other websites and video to get a better idea. Also, notice that specific shops just have 屋 (や) after the thing that is being sold there.

Nations

Here are some word for different nations. If your nation is not in the list, try looking at a dictionary or see if you are able to make the word yourself using katakana.

から is another particle when placed after a place name meaning "from". Since foreign nations are not part of Japanese, these are loan words and therefor use katakana. Most of them will sound the same or at least very similar to as they do in English so they should not be too hard to remember.

Using the word いく, you can tell the places you have been to or where you are going to; to say what country you are from, you can use the verb くる (to come), literally, "I came from".

Directions

When people are telling you how to get somewhere, they will most likely use one of the command forms we covered in the previous lesson.

As an example of giving directions to someone, you may hear something like the sentence below; here, すすむ becomes the command すすんで with the added politeness of ください at the end.

※ Do not get confused about 曲がって here as this is not a command but a connective form; we will learn more about connecting sentences in a later lesson.

Additional Notes