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A question about learning Japanese.

Jarklor

後輩
9 Mar 2014
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Throughout many Japanese books, it seems that they always use either です or ます。I learned だ and だった and using the dictionary form of verbs. but I see regular sentences in Japanese here on the forums that end in all sorts of things. For example, I seen a lot of sentences that end with the particle の. This makes no sense to me at all.

If the majority of Japanese sentences don't end with です or ます, why would books even teach you that? Is it because it's the formal way? If so, how can I learn Japanese that people actually use? I really want to be good at Japanese, but I don't know how. Please help.

I appreciate any answers and I'll rewrite things if it doesn't make sense to you

ありがとう
 
Sentences normally end with a verb (including copula), possibly followed by one or more sentence-end particles. ~ます is a polite non-past verb ending, but it is just one of a number of verb endings. ~です is the polite non-past form of the copula. Again, this is just one form.

の as a sentence-end particle has an explanatory or emphasising effect.
 
です・ます form tends to be taught first for a couple of reasons, both politeness and also that it's relatively easy to conjugate the various polite forms (from ~ます to ~ました / ~ましょう / ~ません etc. is simple)

You also need to know the polite forms, but it's not that ます・です are not used. These forms certainly are used, and often, but it depends what you're looking at. Newspaper reports/wikipedia articles - won't have them. (Wikipedia help pages do use ます・です though). Online cooking sites - everyone uses ます・です with bells on top (literally bells, sometimes).

One last quick point - don't use ありがとう when you're asking a question - you don't do "thanks in advance" in Japanese. You can use よろしくおねがいします there.
 
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