The は (wa) Particle

We learned vocab and sentence structure for age, and nationality, and majors.  And most importantly we learned about our first two Japanese particles.  In English, subjects, verbs, adjectives, &c. are sort of implicitly identified by their conjugation and placement in a sentence.  In Japanese, most of these sentence pieces are identified explicitly by a particle.

For example, the particle は (pronounced 'wa') is the topic marker.  So if I said something like:

わたしはアメリカじんです。 (I am American)

The 'wa' particle (green) is modifying the word 'watashi' (red) which means 'me' or 'I', which indicates that the topic of the sentence is me.  Also, in Japanese sentences always, always end with a verb.  In fact a verb by itself is a valid sentence!  But, there aren't particles to identify verbs, because they're always at the end.  So the sentence above reads literally something like, "As for me, American is".