掲示板 Forums - Particles

In Japanese, particles mark the word they come after as having a certain grammatical function. You can think of them like English suffixes, but instead of adding extra meaning to a word, they add information about what that word is doing in a sentence.

It takes practice to adjust how you think about arranging sentences this way, but when you learn which particles do what, it gets to be very logical and intuitive.

For example, if you can identify what each word is doing in a simple sentence like:

• Me? (Establishing topic or point of contrast) I (subject) eat (verb) cake (object) with a fork (method).

As long as you know that は establishes the topic, が marks the subject, を marks the object of a verb, and で describes tools and methods, you can construct the same sentence in Japanese:

• わたしは　（わたしが）　ケーキを　フォークで　たべます。

(In this case わたしが is redundant to わたしは, because the topic and the subject are the same, so you would leave it out. I just included it to illustrate what the particle is doing.)

A long time ago a Persian linguist, who didn’t speak Japanese but had studied the grammar, told me that Japanese was easy, it was just an agglutinative language like Turkish. Although I can’t vouch for any part of that statement, it does point to an essential aspect of particles: they aren’t full-fledged words so much as suffixes you paste onto whatever came before to modify it.
So you can append a particle to a noun to make it an adjective, to an adjective to make it a noun, to a noun phrase (NP) to make it a post-positional phrase (PP, like a prepositional phrase but reversed), to a verb-stem to inflect it, to a statement to make it into a question. And so on.

The other important thing that particles do in Japanese is assign grammatical case. Unlike English, whose grammar is highly dependent on word-order, Japanese is very free with word order. Particles allow you to easily identify the subject of a sentence, for example, even when it comes in an unusual place.

I hope this helps.