Particles

There isn't much to say about my japanese language lessons except that i've been finding the usage of particles particularly frustrating (no pun intended...). I only have a partial (ok, i'm now on a roll here...) understanding of particles which limits my participation in class. Even my partner and my party of classmates are partly dissed by it. Argh!

Seriously now... The particles are really confusing. There's わ(wa), が(ga), を(o), に(ni), へ(e), で(de), の(no), と(to), や(ya), も(mo), ね(ne), か(ka), よ(yo), and な(na), just to mention a few that i've learnt. Each of them indicates a subject or denotes a certain action, and the careless usage of them will have an entirely different meaning. There are also a set of rules governing these particles.

And it's really (x10) confusing. There could be a string of が and の in one sentence and you'd have to decipher them one by one. が is a subject indicator and could also mean 'but'. の is a possession indicator. So just imagine a sentence like Jimmy's brother's son's dog's collar, and you have about 4 の's in the sentence. と and や simply means 'and', but each particle is used differently. に could mean 'in' to 'to'. It all depends on the context of the sentence, so you'd have to read all of it before deciding what it actually means.

'cheem' hor? That's only the tip of the iceberg...