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Hello,
I am currently in Season 2 at the end of the Developing a Sense of Identity chapter to give everyone an insight into how much I have learned.
I now understand the multiple ways to say “I” and “you” to some degree, but I did not see a mention of “your”. This could be a topic later in TextFugu, but I have seen nothing so far.
For example, to say “Your language is Japanese.”, the closest thing I can think to say is あなた は げんご にほんご です。 or あなた は にほんご げんご です。 or to replace “あなた” with the person’s name. However, I think this more accurately translates to “You are a Japanese language”, which is odd to say to anyone.
If anyone could give their input or share an article or anything I would greatly appreciate it as I had no luck with Google searches.
Thank you,
Xelthon
You could say あなた の げんご to express “your language”, although you might want to use 母国語(ぼこくご) to mean “native language”, since けんご means just “language” with no other context.
So for your example, “Your native language is Japanese” becomes あなた の ぼこくご は にほんご です。To express the idea of “your” or any other kind of “possession” you use the particle の. It’s covered in Season 2 of TextFugu: http://www.textfugu.com/season-2/being-possessive/
よろしくおねがいします！Just so’s you know, by the way, the use of second-person pronouns is not nearly as common in Japanese as it is in English. You’d generally use their name instead. The function of the particle の, as Alex suggested, is still the same, though.
Okay, thank you very much for the help Alex and Joel. I figured we learned how to say things such as my and your, but I was not patient enough considering it was just a few chapters away. I appreciate the insight very much.
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