What About You And Your Friends?
“True friends stab you in the front” - Oscar Wilde
This last part is just a little extra practice, and also a way for you to try and apply what you’ve learned to real life (specifically your life!). Here’s what I want you to do:
- Make a list of people you know (friends, family, etc). Between 5-10 people is probably good.
- Also, add yourself to the list.
- Then, next to their names, write down what they do / what they are (nouns only, please!).
- Take the list of things they are, and find translations for those things. So, if someone is an “Electrical Engineer,” you’d go to jisho.org, click the “common words” check box, and do a search to figure out the Japanese word for “Electrical Engineer.” Do this with all of your peeps.
- When you have a list of people (including you), and the things they do / the things they are, it’s time to practice.
Here’s some things you can do with this list (i.e. these are the things you should do when you’ve completed it).
- Take the list of people and things, and create AはBです sentences for all of them. So, if your friend “Darth Vader” is a “High School Student” you would write: “Darthさんはこうこうせいです”
- Now, take a look at the things they don’t do. Create AはBじゃありません sentences with them. So, your friend Darth is a High School Student, and your other friend Luke is a “Samurai.” If that is the case, you could write: “Lukeさんはこうこうせいじゃありません” because he’s not a high school student.
- Go through your list and see if you can remember what some of these people used to be. Create a few AはBでした sentences. So, if Luke was a Ninja before being a Samurai, you could say: “Lukeさんはにんじゃでした.”
This page is just a nice way to get some extra practice with this, as well as a way to help you think about how you can use some of this grammar in real life. It wouldn’t be all that useful if you didn’t create some of your own stuff, after all! :)
After you’re done, time to move on to the next chapter. There you’ll be learning how to describe things in a different way.
By completing this chapter, you’ve probably gained some flexibility in how you use the things you’ve learned. Hopefully you can start seeing how you can apply what you’re learning to real life. We’ll do more of this as we move along (it gets easier to do the more and more you learn!), but hopefully this gets you started thinking along that path!