You should be familiar with this sentence structure. It means Mr Tanaka drinks two cups of red tea every morning. MaIASa and Ni HaI are abverbs. The former refers to time and the latter refers to number or quantity. If you delete these two adverbs, the sentence becomes "Tanaka SaN Wa KoUSya Wo NoMi MaSu." - Subject + Wa + Object + Wo + Verb + MaSu. It means that Mr. Tanaka drinks red tea. In Japanese, the adverb for number is follow an object. But the adverb for time is before an object. If you shift the position, the grammer is not wrong but it sounds clumsy.

		KyoU Wa BuTaNiKu Wo SaNByaKu GURAMU KaI MaSiTa.
		RiNGo Wo YoN Ko To TaMaGo Wo NiZitu Ko KaI MaSiTa.

The above two sentences do not have subject. It is assumed that the sentences were spoken by the speaker so the subjects were omitted. You may argue that in the first sentence there is a subject marker Wa after KyoU(today). Yes, it looks like a subject. But the complete sentence should be - KyoU WaTaSi Wa BuTaNiKu Wo ...". Kyou is an adverb to indicate time, but the subject WaTaSi(I/speaker) is omitted, so KyoU is moved beside Wa and caused illusion.

Wo is an object marker, so we know that BuTaNiKu(pork), RiNGo(apple), TaMaGo(egg) are objects. Follows are SaNByaKu(300) GURAMU(gram), YoN(4) Ko(piece/unit), NiZitu(20) Ko(piece/unit). They are adverbs to modify the number's unit. The end of each sentence is a verb sentence KaI(buy) and past tense MaSiTa.

Below tables are shown how to count number, people, sheet, lump, piece, age, year, hour, minute, week, :

~Tu(Piece)/~Ko(Lump)/~MaI(Sheet)/~PoN(Rod)

~HiTo(People)/~SaI(Age)/~NeN(Year)

~ZiKaN(Hour)/~PuN(Minute)/~SyuUKaN(Week)

Listening Comprehension: How's the weather in Peking.

Previous | Top | next