じゃありません (It Is Not)
“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.” – GK Chesterton
So far with です we’ve been positive about everything. It is a dog. It is a monkey. It is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. We haven’t learned how to say “it is not something” yet, but we’re about to. The thing is, you pretty much already know how to do it. In terms of grammar, you’re already there. All you need to do is learn the negative version of です, and that’s pretty easy.
This grammar point is just like です. All you need to do is replace です with じゃありません and you go from “it is” to “it is not.” Simple, right? Now, the hard part about じゃありません, really, is the pronunciation of it. It’s a bit of a mouthful and kind of long. Eventually, we’ll learn the less formal version of じゃありません, which is shorter and easier, but for now you should learn the neutral formal version, since it’s usable in almost all situations (whereas the casual version is not).
Take a look at this video to learn the pronunciation of じゃありません.