of side dishes served with soup, rice, pickles, and salad; full-course lunch / dinnerCulture and vocabulary notes
The prefixes go- and o- in go-han, o-sushi, o-cha, o-mizu, and so on make the noun more polite to Japanese ears. Male speakers sometimes omit the prefixes, but female speakers almost always use them. In some cases, for example in go-han, the prefix cannot be dropped. You are advised to use only the polite form, which is always correct.
When a noun is used as the second part of a compound word, its pronunciation often changes slightly; e.g. in nigirizushi the s of sushi changes to z. The ei in eiga (movie) is pronounced more like ē, as are the ei spellings in other Japanese words
The word o-cha refers to Japanese green tea; kōcha (literally red tea) refers to black tea.
In English you “eat” soup, while in Japanese you “drink” soup. This reflects different eating habits. In the West, you use a soup spoon and do not lift the soup bowl. In Japan, you hold the bowl (usually a piece of lacquerware) in the palm of the left hand, bring the soup bowl close to your mouth, and drink or sip the soup. Any item in the soup such as fish, vegetables, or tofu may be eaten with the help of chopsticks. Good luck in picking up tofu with chopsticks; it requires some skill! And just as a note, when you pick up an item of food with chopsticks, it’s not necessary to take it all in at one gulp. It’s quite proper to bite off just a small piece.
Grammar
The next two sentence patterns will be of great help to you in restaurants, stores, and train stations. By mastering these patterns and the new verbs they introduce, you will be able to satisfy most of your basic needs as a traveler in Japan.
More detailed notes on verb conjugation will be presented later in this book. Looking at Sentence Patterns 2 and 3, however, we can make a few initial remarks about verbs and about Japanese sentence construction. First, note that stating the subject (I, in this case) is usually not necessary in Japanese when the subject is obvious from the context of the sentence. Also, Tabetai desu by itself is a complete sentence.
| Sentence Pattern 2 | |
| NOUN + ga / + VERB-INFINITIVE + tai desu.NOUN + が + VERB-INFINITIVE + たいです。 | I’d like to + VERB + NOUN. |
| Examples | |
| Sukiyaki ga tabetai desu.すき焼きが食べたいです。 | I’d like to eat sukiyaki. |
| Biiru ga nomitai desu.ビールが飲みたいです。 | I’d like to drink beer. |
| Kamera ga kaitai desu.カメラが買いたいです。 | I’d like to buy a camera. |
| Kabuki ga mitai desu.歌舞伎が見たいです。 | I’d like to see a Kabuki play. |
| Sentence Pattern 3 | |
| PLACE + e / ikitai desu.PLACE + へ行きたいです。 | I’d like to go to + place. |
| Examples | |
| Kyōto e ikitai desu.京都へ行たいです。 | I’d like to go to Kyoto. |
| Nihon e ikitai desu.日本へ行たいです。 | I’d like to go to Japan. |
In Japanese, the words carrying a verbal meaning usually go at the very end of the sentence. In the previous examples, the -tai desu ending expresses the meaning “would like to do” and is attached to what we will call the verb-infinitive form of the verb. This will be explained later, but for now, memorize the following verb-infinitives and note the -tai desu endings.
| eat | tabe-食べ- | Tabetai desu.食べたいです。 | (I) would like to eat. |
| drink | nomi-飲み- | Nomitai desu.飲みたいです。 | (I) would like to drink. |
| buy | kai-買い- | Kaitai desu.買いたいです。 | (I)
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