Verbs

[adric]

I'm starting to finally get purchase on Japanese verbs, thanks in part to "Living Language Japanese"¹. Here's my new understanding, comments welcome.

Somewhat like Spanish, which has two "to be"-esque verbs (ser and estar), Japanese has two basic "to be"s:
desu (です) and arimasu (あります ). In Spanish, ser is for things of permenance (Soy americano, soy de Atlanta, pero vivo en Norcross y estoy un poco cansado .. es hace caliente en nuestra oficina) and estar for transient states. In Japanese there are (at least) desu for "is equal to" and a seperate verb arimasu for "is located". Perhaps even more interesting is that arimasu is reserved for inanimate objects, and for people another form imasu ( います) is used.

The negative forms in Japanese are pretty straighforward, and I have about absorbed the principle which explains the "A ja nai desu" common in Irasshai² and used in Japanese for Everybody³. Past tense, and the wonderfully useful uncertain tense are done with suffixes.

¹:ISBN: 1-4000-2019-0 is a small book and CDs set for $25 USD
²:http://168.28.132.151/peachstar/irasshai/homepg.htm
³: fixme

Comments

[malerin.livejournal.com]

imasu is used for (as I recall) animate objects, not just people (ie neko ga imasu). I also think trees get imasu, but that's it. I always thought of arimasu as "is existing" (sushi ga arimasu), but it's one of those weird words with no real translation. "is located" is probably good enough as any.

[adric]

I was using people with a prettyt broad definition there, but I did mean to include the question:

かみがありますか。かみさまがありますか。

[arya.livejournal.com]

Think of arimasu/imasu like "there exists ____", whereas desu is more like "____ is ____". Arimasu/imasu is more of an existential verb and desu is more of an equals sign.