What Is The Sentence-Ender か?

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” – Pablo Picasso

Hopefully you can read the kana in the title (か). If you can’t, take a look at your hiragana list and figure it out. We’ll continue practicing hiragana over the rest of this season, but this is a kana you should definitely know (and if you don’t, you’ll know it by the end of this chapter, for sure).

Now “sentence-enders” aren’t things you really have in English. Because of the way Japanese grammar is laid out, a lot of things have “sentence-enders” on them. They’re basically grammar that go onto the end of sentence or phrases to modify them in some way. The sentence-ender か is one of them.

When you add か to the end of a sentence, it becomes a question

When か is placed onto the end of a sentence or phrase, it basically serves as a question mark. Although you see question marks sometimes in Japanese sentences (adopted from the West, of course), you’ll most often see か used to indicate a question.

When you understand that か on the end of a sentence makes that sentence into a question, move on to the next page

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