Welcome to Lesson 9!
Building on your understanding of Japanese short forms from Lesson 8, Lesson 9 will teach you how to embed these forms into more complex and practical sentence structures. You’ll learn how to share your opinions, report what others have said, make polite negative requests, and talk about actions themselves.
The main goals of this lesson are to enable you to:
- Express estimation, hearsay, and prohibition using the short form.
- Understand and create more complex sentence structures using the short form.
Key grammar patterns and expressions you will master in this lesson include:
- Expressing Your Thoughts: Learn how to state what you think or believe using the pattern (short form) + と思います (to omoimasu). This is essential for sharing your personal opinions (e.g., 私はそれがいいと思います – I think that is good).
- Reporting What Someone Said: Discover how to convey information you heard from another person using the pattern (short form) + と言っていました (to itte imashita), meaning “(Someone) said that ~”.
- Making Polite Negative Requests: Learn a crucial pattern for asking someone not to do something: V-ない + でください (nai de kudasai), meaning “Please don’t do ~” (e.g., ここで写真を撮らないでください – Please don’t take pictures here).
- Nominalizing Verbs: Explore how to turn a verb phrase into a noun using V(short form) + の. This allows you to treat actions as subjects or objects in sentences, opening up many new ways to express yourself (e.g., 走るのが好きです – I like running).
By the end of Lesson 9, you’ll be able to comfortably state your opinions, report conversations, make polite negative requests, and discuss activities as concepts. These structures are fundamental for more nuanced and varied Japanese communication!
Explore the articles linked below to master expressing thoughts, reporting speech, negative requests, and nominalizing verbs in Japanese!
