Japanese for Beginners] Chapter 4: The Copula (To be or not to be)

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To be or not to be

Shakespear said it was an important question, “To be or not to be”, and indeed it is quite important in grammar to know how to express the copula. In this lesseon we are going to look at the Japanese form of “to be”, in present and past tense, and also in positive and negative. Let’s try a simple sentence.

ねこです.

This sentence reads: “Neko desu”. Neko meaning Cat, and Desu being our copula “To be”. So this sentence says “It is a cat”. Desu is the present positive copula, this means affirm that something exists right now. “It was a Cat”, would therefore be past positive, since it was something in the past. Before we move on to the past positive, let’s look at three rules for the copula:

1: The verb (to be) always comes at the end of a sentence
2: The verb (to be) can refer to any number of existance, therefore “Neko desu” can be either one car or a whole bunch of cats. Later we will learn of words that can help us define the quantity, but in general, the rule is that nouns can be plural or singular
3: There are no words for “an” or “a” in Japanese, there are words for “this” and “that”, but those will be covered later on.

Okay, time for the past positive, ready? Here we go with the example:

ねこでした.

“Neko deshita” translates to “It was a cat”. By putting Deshita after our noun, we confirm at it existed in the past. The Shi part is pronounced with a silent “i”, so when you say it, it will sound like Desh-ta. The same goes for Desu, which has a silent silent “u” and will therefore be pronounced Des. Look at the following sentences and see if you can tell which ones are present positive and which ones are past positive.

くるまです.
りんごでした.
ねこでした.
アメリカです.
みずでした.

Not too hard was it? Even if you didn’t know the words, you could distinguish the verbs at the end. Here is the translation of these sentences.

“Kuruma desu” - “It’s a car.”
“Ringo deshita” - “It was an apple.”
“Neko deshita” - “It was a cat.”
“Amerika desu” - “It’s Amerika.”
“Mizu deshita” - “It was water.”

Now that we know the present and past positives, what about the negative? We can start with the present negative, or the affirmation that something does not exist at this time. So let’s turn the first sentence we used into the present negative.

ねこではありません.

“Neko dewa arimasen” is the polite form of “It’s not a cat”. You will notice that I wrote “deha”, this is because of an abnormality in Japanese that tells us to write Wa as Ha when it comes to grammar and particles. So remember that when you use the particle Wa, or you use it in the copula, you write it as Ha. However, when you write words in hiragana such as “watashi”, you still use the normal Wa. The more you use Japanese, the more you will get used to this, so don’t worry about it too much. In normal Japanese (the Japanese you would speak with friends or colleagues), “dewa arimasen” will mostly be cut down to “arimasen”. “Dewa arimasen” is the politest form of the present negative copula, so it’s better to use it when you don’t know how polite you should be. Generally, Japanese people are very polite with strangers, so the more polite you are as a tourist, the more smiles you’ll see.

All that is left for us now is the past negative form of the copula. So go on and read the next sentence already! :)

ねこではありませんでした.

They just get longer and longer don’t they? “Neko dewa arimasen deshita” sounds very logical, since it’s a combination of the past positive and the present negative. Before we move on to the last part of the lesson, let’s recap on the different forms of the verb “To be”.

All verbs follow these four tenses, but the verb “To be” has one extra tense, which is the future tense “Deshou”. Look at the example.

ねこでしょう.

“Neko deshou” can either become positive or negative, but since it is the future you won’t be sure untill you see it. Therefore “deshou” is normally translated with “probably”. So the example would mean “It is probably a cat”.

To close this chapter, here is a review of the words used in this lesson. See you next time!

Other lessons in this series:

• Japanese for Beginners: Chapter 1 The Japanese Alphabet
• Japanese for Beginners: Chapter 2 Basic Greetings
• Japanese for Beginners: Chapter 3 Basic Sentence Structure
• Japanese for Beginners: Chapter 4 The Copula (to be or not to be)
• Japanese for Beginners: Learning Kanji Grade 1

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