Using Names

“By banishing doubt and trusting your intuitive feelings, you clear a space for the power of intention to flow through.” – Wayne Dyer

Perhaps you’ve already figured it out, but you can put names in these A/B spots as well. Although we’ll talk about names a lot more in future chapters, it’s important to go over a couple of things really quick (like I said, we’ll go into more detail on this within the next couple chapters). Here’s all you need to know for this page, though:

  1. When saying someone else’s name, you’ll want to add さん to the end of it. So, if you were talking about Bob (and Bob isn’t you), you’d want to say Bobさん to be polite.
  2. When talking about yourself, or saying your own name (for example, “I am Bob”) you don’t add anything to it at all.

Essentially, adding さん to a name is a respectful thing to do. It raises the other person up, and humbles yourself (very important in Japanese!). You don’t want to raise yourself up and humble other people, so you won’t want to add さん to your own name.

Anyways, let’s take a look at these sentences. They follow the same exact pattern (AはBです) that you just learned, but instead of things, we’re talking about people.

こういちさん　は　せんせい　です。

Koichi-san is a teacher / As for Koichi-san, he is a teacher.

ひとみさん　は　こども　です。

Hitomi-san is a child / As for Hitomi-san, she is a child.

ぼぼさん　は　いぬ　じゃありません。

Bobo-san is not a dog / As for Bobo-san, he is not a dog.

Using this, you can say all sorts of things about a person. “[name] is ______です” or “[name] is ________じゃありません” will get you pretty far in a Japanese police interrogation. Let’s try it out:

“WHO IS JASON?”

“I don’t know… I don’t know…”

*SMACK*

“WHO IS JASON!??”

“Jason… Jason は いぬです！”

“Let him go… he’s crazy.”

We’ll practice a lot more with names very soon, but I just wanted to show how flexible this pattern can be. With a little extra grammar added onto it though, sentences will get 10x more flexible. Stay tuned.

A quick note on “tenses” in Japanese… Another weird thing about the Japanese language is the lack of differentiation between present and future tense. There is no “real” future tense, and everything just comes from context. We’ll see more of this as we move along, but it’s something you should keep in mind right now. The sooner you get used to the idea, the better. You’ll see this much more clearly when we start our work on verbs.

Alright – so this page was actually fairly short on practice, but there’s a reason for that: we’ll be doing this a lot more in the “Developing A Sense Of Identity” chapter, and it’ll be in much greater detail. Just keep this in your mind, and make sure you understand how the sentences work, even if you can’t quite produce “identity” related sentences yet. Do be able to create other AはB sentences before moving on though, please. The next chapter builds right on top of this one, after all!

One more quick thing before you move on to the next chapter, and that thing is kanji. Dun dun dunnn.

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