If you've studied Japanese before, or read some of our other lessons, you may have seen certain important words in sentences referred to as "particles."

This lesson is here, again, to tell you that all of that was wrong.

Just kidding.

Kind of.

According to Japanese grammar textbooks, the class of words that most English-language Japanese resources call "particles" are actually named 助詞 (jyoshi). And while "particle" is a decent translation that serves as a shorthand to explain their basic function, it's also important to remember that the English word "particle" probably didn't even exist yet when 助詞 (jyoshi) arose in the Japanese language and, even if it did, it almost certainly wasn't in the mind of Japanese speakers.

Both English particles and Japanese 助詞 (jyoshi) attach to other words in a sentence to describe their meaning and/or relations. But it's worth noting that certain 助詞 (jyoshi) are much more prominent and grammatically important in Japanese than particles are in English, and that the descriptive and relational functions that they have are also completely distinct from those that exist in English (there is definitively not one Japanese 助詞 (jyoshi) for every English particle, nor vice-versa).

Therefore, as we have in other lessons, we will still sometimes use the word "particle" to talk about the 助詞 (jyoshi) in English, but it's crucial not to equate them with the English grammatical concept in your mind.

English particle ≠ Japanese 助詞 (jyoshi)

In this lesson, we will elaborate on the similarities and differences of English particles and Japanese 助詞 (jyoshi) which will be crucial to your study of the latter in the following lessons. We will also introduce one of the most important 助詞 (jyoshi), は (wa).

Particles in English

First, let's quickly look at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary's definition of an English particle:

particle noun
par·​ti·​cle ˈpär-ti-kəl

a unit of speech expressing some general aspect of meaning or some connective or limiting relation and including the articles, most prepositions and conjunctions, and some interjections and adverbs

Now, that's admittedly not the clearest definition. But hopefully you get the general idea: we're talking about words that are used in conjunction with other words in order to somehow change or clarify their meaning. There are a lot of these in English, and they overlap with other parts of speech such as prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and adverbs. Some of the words we're talking about here include under, and, not, and between.

If you recognize these words and are able to put them in context in your mind, you might notice that they have a variety of levels of importance. In the sentence "Bill and John ran under the bridge to hide out from the rain and called home," the word "under" really only tells us where Bill and John ran to, it doesn't have any effect on the rest of the sentence, whereas the word "and" crucially connects the sentence's two clauses, though doesn't necessarily affect either of them.

助詞 (jyoshi) in Japanese

With all that in mind, let's look at the type of Japanese word that is usually referred to as a "particle" in English, the 助詞 (jyoshi).

When trying to figure out the meaning of a Japanese word, a great way to start is always to look at the kanji that make up the word:

- 助 (jo) — help, rescue, assistant
- 詞 (shi) — part of speech, words, poetry

助詞 (jyoshi) — "helper words"

Here, you may begin to see why we translate jyoshi as "particle" in English. The implication is that this is a word that helps another word locate its meaning, its relation to other words, or both: it's quite literally a "helper word."

However, let's also now look at a formal definition for jyoshi like we did for particle. The definition below is taken from a lesson produced by the Benesse Corporation, a company which provides correspondence courses for Japanese compulsory education students.

「助詞」とは、ことばに意味を付け加えるはたらきをする語のこと。
jyoshi to wa, kotoba ni imi wo tsukekuwaeru hataraki wo suru go no koto.
(speaking of) jyoshi: a word that is attached to another word and works to add meaning

You can see that this definition is fairly similar to the one from English. It's arguably just a bit clearer, while still remaining fairly vague and broad, referring to all words that are attached to other words to affect their meaning.

However, an interesting note is that the lesson our definition is from isn't actually focused around particles in general. We don't have to get into the details right now (though the article is worth a read if and when your Japanese is good enough), but the article actually sets out to define a different word: てにをは (teniwoha).

You see, similar to particles in English, Japanese 助詞 (jyoshi) can be divided into several categories. According to the article, てにをは (teniwoha) is a name for the "main" group of particles in Japanese. Now, admittedly, this term seems to be somewhat dated, and it's difficult to find a consensus on which exact 助詞 (jyoshi) fall into this group. However, the important thing to remember is that this is the set of 助詞 (jyoshi) that indicate the grammatical roles of and relationships between different nouns in a Japanese sentence. These 助詞 (jyoshi) are core to Japanese grammar and feature in almost every Japanese sentence.

In fact, in our definition of 助詞 (jyoshi), you can immediately see the usage of a few of these "main" 助詞 (jyoshi), including は (wa), に (ni), and を (wo). For the purposes of the rest of this lesson, let's focus on the crucial は (wa) 助詞 (jyoshi) which, in the definition, clearly shows us that the topic we're discussing is what came immediately before it (in this case, 助詞 (jyoshi)). For that reason, は (wa) is often called the "topic 助詞 (jyoshi)."

は (wa) — The Topic 助詞 (jyoshi)

While simple, は (wa) is arguably the most important 助詞 (jyoshi) because it sets the topic of the rest of the sentence, maybe even multiple sentences. This can be seen in a sentence you may be familiar with even if you barely know any Japanese, a typical Japanese greeting:

Note that we tried to be literal with the translation. Since the parentheticals are mostly implied meanings, the closest thing to the は (wa) 助詞 (jyoshi) in English may be the way that we use a colon (:) in English. A more natural translation for the sentence above may simply be "I'm a student," but remember that translations like that can cause many Japanese learners to get the は (wa) 助詞 (jyoshi)'s function confused with the concept of a "subject" in English. Do not make this mistake.

Always remember that the English grammar does not map to Japanese grammar 1:1. After all, we just learned a Japanese word that has the meaning of an English colon!

The concept of a sentence subject also exists in Japanese, and while it may very well be the same as a previously established topic, it certainly doesn’t have to be. They can also be two distinct things that together contribute to the meaning of the sentence.

Let's consider this more complex example to end the lesson:

Pretty interesting, right? Even though the game is clearly the topic of the sentence, the actual action of the sentence ("winning") obviously revolves around an entirely different subject: "my team," marked by the が (ga) 助詞 (jyoshi).

Conclusion

We hope this lesson helped you understand the importance and power of 助詞 (jyoshi) in Japanese, as well as one of their most crucial members, は (wa).

If you want to know more about 助詞 (jyoshi), and in particular that last example, join us in our next lesson, where we'll be covering the が (ga) 助詞 (jyoshi).

Until next time,

これからもよろしくお願いします。

Kore kara mo yoroshiku onegaishimasu