What Japanese Particle Do I Use :Lists.
There’s a lot of really basic words in English that just don’t translate directly into Japanese. One of these is “and.” We use “and” all the time in English, in a lot of different ways. But there’s not really a word in Japanese that we can use in all the same ways.
What Japanese Particle Do I Use: Lists
Today I’m going to talk about listing things in Japanese and how you can express the same ideas that English words like “and,” “also,” and “or” mean.
Japanese Particle lists : And (Exhaustive)
When you’re listing something, the particle you’ll probably use to express the same idea as English “and” is to (と). The use of to is much more limited than English “and,” so let’s look at what it can and can’t do.
The first important thing about to is that it makes an exhaustive list. The list you make with to is complete, and nothing is missing.
So if you take the example sentence “I will buy apples and oranges,” you would say “Ringo to mikan wo kau” (りんごとみかんを買う). This means you’re going to buy apples and oranges and nothing else. This is different from other ways to make lists that we’ll talk about soon.
The particle to can also mean “with.” If you’re going somewhere with your friend, you can say something like “Kare to issho ni iku” (彼と一緒に行く) or “I’m going with him.”
It’s also important to know that in English we can use “and” to connect way more than we can in Japanese with to. A big difference here is that to can’t be used to connect sentences. If you want to connect your sentences with “and” in Japanese, you’ll need to rely on verb conjugations or words like “soshite” (そして).
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Japanese Particle lists : And (Inexhaustive)
So what do you say if you’re just making a general, incomplete list? In English you can still express this with “and” as long as you add something that shows that this list isn’t complete. So you can say “I will buy things such as apples and oranges.” But how do you say this in Japanese?
For lists like this, you can use ya (や). The sentence would then become “Ringo ya mikan wo kau” (りんごやみかんを買う). Apples and oranges are included in the list as examples. You might buy them, but you also might buy other fruit. It’s pretty nice that in Japanese you only have to change the to to a ya, and it can change the meaning so much.
Another way you can say this is with toka (とか). Toka is super similar to ya, and it makes an incomplete list. The difference here is that ya can be used for pretty much just nouns, while toka works for actions and states too.
This means you can tack toka onto lists that use verbs. That doesn’t work with ya.
There are other ways you can list verbs, like conjugating them and adding “-tari” (たり). In fact, a lot of these particles I’m talking about are going to have various alternatives. There’s a lot of ways to list things in Japanese and connect sentences, so make sure to listen for them. You’ll eventually be able to pick up when to use particles like this or verb conjugations instead.
Japanese Particle lists : Also
Sometimes we use the word “and” in English to mean “also.” To can kind of express this, but the particle mo (も) is a much more specific way to do so.
If we take our apples and oranges example from above, we can change it to “There are apples and oranges.” In Japanese we can say “Ringo mo mikan mo aru” (りんごもみかんもある).
Japanese Particle lists : Or
Another word we use to connect things in English is “or.” One of the easiest ways to do this in Japanese is with ka (か). Ka is nice because it can be used with nouns and verbs.
If we want to plug it into our example, we can say “I will buy apples or oranges,” by saying “Ringo ka mikan wo kau” (りんごかみかんを買う).
When I use ka, I tend to think of it as a question mark (which is a habit from using it as a sentence-ending particle). It’s kind of fun for me to think of it as “Apples? Oranges? I’ll buy one!” Maybe that can help you remember it too.
This List is Inexhaustive
There’s a lot of ways to connect ideas in Japanese. I barely scratched the surface here. But hopefully this can serve as a starting point and show you that things in Japanese might not be what you’re used to from English. Be sure to keep your ears open, and you’ll get the hang of it.
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