Recently I wote about the anime and light novel series Kore wa Zombie desu ka? and I thought I’d give a short grammar lesson. One of the most useful words of Japanese is the “subject marker” wa, which is essentially a grammatical particle that indicates the subject of a Japanese sentence. (Example: kono manga wa shiro-kuro desu, “this manga is black-and-white”). The official Romanization of the title is KOREHA ZOMBIE DESUKA?, and if you wondered what the “HA” was doing there, well, the particle wa is always written with the hiragana that’s normally read ha, which is where this comes from. Personally, I learned Japanese by treating example sentences as mathematical formulas, switching in different words to create new meanings. It’s as good a way to study nihongo as any I know of.
Memorizing Japanese sentences is a good way to learn.
