Talk:Particles (Japanese)

• Participles are always written in hiragana.

This wouldn't be true for a telegram written all in katakana. Ha ha, just being technical.

I think what you really meant is that kanji is never used for particles. This actually leads to a more general point: that there are some ideas which cannot be expressed with kanji alone. For example, the tense of verbs is expressed with kanji: like (write) + shimash'ta => written. --Ed Poor ^Talk 06:47, 8 December 2008 (EST)

Pronunciation

Any other idiosyncrasies besides wa and o? These are very likely to trip up the beginner, so I'd like to find a place to collect and highlight them. If you ever try to transliterate from kana to romaji (or vice versa) you would have to know about these particles. Do I write wa and say ha? Or vice versa? Let's help our readers (your students) be clear on this. --Ed Poor ^Talk 06:54, 8 December 2008 (EST)

That is a good point - the only other one is "e", written as "he" (へ). We will have to keep a note of these little things as we go along, so we can tidy up the lose ends as we come across them. I will add notes for wa, o and e. --KotomiT^{ohayougozaimasu} 07:41, 8 December 2008 (EST)

Kana, kana?

Is it worth, do you think, adding the kana for each romaji example too, or will that over-complicate matters? --KotomiT^{ohayougozaimasu} 10:17, 8 December 2008 (EST)

At this point, I wouldn't worry about adding kana to this article. At some later date, we might go through all your work and transliterate all your romaji examples into kana. I wrote a computer program in Javascript to help with that; I uploaded it to Wikipedia somewhere. But there's no hurry, and I'm sure someone else has better software for this. --Ed Poor ^Talk 10:22, 8 December 2008 (EST)

Number of syllables

Are postpositions still called particles when they have two syllables? --Ed Poor ^Talk 13:51, 8 December 2008 (EST) lol. remember these are used by the same people who invented eating fish before they invented kitchens. --KotomiT^{ohayougozaimasu} 14:11, 8 December 2008 (EST)

Those crucial distinctions

Thank you, Jessica, for this distinction. One of the hardest things for me, when I was studying Japanese, was to know how to choose between particles. Many times, they seemed equivalent, but I kept getting marked wrong on tests. --Ed Poor ^Talk 06:51, 12 December 2008 (EST)