As I mentioned in the previous post, Japanese uses particles to explicitly mark different ... uh... for lack of a better term, structural words in a sentence. So for example, the topic of a sentence is followed by a 'wa' particle that says, "what you just read is the topic of this sentence!". In class this week, we also learned about the の 'no' particle, which means something like "of", but backwards. I'll just use English to demonstrate at first, and then do a Japanese example:
I の name は Sam です。(My name is Sam)
Literally, this looks something like, "As for, name of me, Sam is." Or if I wanted to talk about my friend Bill's major, I would say "Bill の major", or the "major of Bill". Get it? It's like putting 'of' in there, but reversing the words. So far I've used it sorta the same way a possessive 's might be used in English, but it works for other constructs too. For example, if I wanted to say I was a student of UCI, I would say "UCI の student".
From what I can tell, words combined with の end up as a sort of compound word that gets built into the structure of the rest of the sentence. So for example in:
わたしのせんこうはコンピューターです。(My major is Computers)
The underlined part of the sentence (My major) is a combination of two words combined with の that act as the topic (marked by は) of the sentence.
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