Practicing Questions & Answers

“In order to improve the mind, we ought less learn than to contemplate.” – Rene Descartes

Let’s take a look at some of these pictures. I’m just going to use an English word for the noun (so you can focus on the grammar rather than trying to remember the vocab). Of course, since you don’t know how to say “no, it’s not” all the answers will be a positive “yes, it is a …”

Write and say (out loud) the answer before clicking on the “answer” tag. Try to become knowledgeable about the grammar (rather than just understanding the pattern itself). Do you know how each part works?

Octopus ですか。　Answer →

Elvisさんですか。　Answer →

Crazy Japanese Guy ですか。 Answer →

Surfer guy jumping into the ocean off of a pier ですか。Answer →

Have you noticed that it doesn’t really matter how long or wild the subject of the sentence is? I really just wanted you to understand the grammar part of this, which is why I did that, so hopefully it worked. Asking questions isn’t all that bad, right?

Asking Questions Without か

There are also times in Japanese where the sentence-ender か is omitted, and the speaker is still able to ask a question. Usually this is done through casual speech (which we will learn about later, after we understand a lot more about standard speech). To do this, all you do is raise your tone at the end of a sentence… just like when you’re asking a question in English? Really, it’s the same thing, so it shouldn’t feel foreign to do. We won’t be doing this now, however, but I wanted to make sure you knew about it so when you’re doing more listening exercises it doesn’t confuse you.

Now that you’ve gone through everything, it’s time to look at some practice. We’ll be going through some ですか sentences, reviewing です, and then learning the 1-2 stroke radicals (finally getting started with that kanji thing!). Anyways, best to practice while it’s fresh on your mind, so get to it!

← 後Practice →

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