Masculine Sentence Enders

“I was feeling real good and real manly. Until a real cowboy walked by and told me I had my hat on backwards. So much for my career as a cowboy.” - Michael Biehn

Masculine sentence enders, as you can probably imagine, are manly mainly used by men. If you’re a girl and use them, you’ll sound a bit like a tomboy, though there’s some mixing of gendered language going on to some extent on both sides.

Just like with feminine sentence enders, I’ll go through the basics of each. You don’t have to know how to use them yet (actually, this kind of thing is sort of advanced), you just have to know about them and know they exist. That way, as you’re studying (on TextFugu or otherwise) you’ll be able to point something out and say “oh, I shouldn’t be mimicking that, otherwise I’ll sound like a _____.”

ぞ

ぞ is a lot like よ in that it indicates assertion, though it’s a bit more casual. It’s used with casual form (which you won’t learn until the beginning of Season 5) so you’ll have to take what you can out of the example for this one and just know what ぞ does (even if you don’t understand the example).

ぜんぶ　たべたぞ！
I ate it all!

ぞ is fairly positive sounding – the next sentence ender not so much.

ぜ

ぜ and ぞ are very similar, it’s mainly the feeling that’s different. In general, it’s not very polite (so you shouldn’t use it with people you don’t know really well) and it’s a bit more forceful (remember, in Japanese, more forceful = less polite). As long as you know this is a less polite version of ぞ, you’ll be fine.

かい

かい has the same usage as か (the question marker), except it’s more masculine. It’s actually considered to be a little gentler sounding than か. This is also used with casual form, so if you don’t understand the example, that’s okay. Just make sure you understand what it does (if you understand か, then you understand this).

ぜんぶ　たべたかい？
Did you eat it all?

かな／かなぁ

かな is the masculine version of the feminine かしら. For this, you’re actually combining question marker か and な (which adds some uncertainty to what you’re saying).

すし　を　たべたかなぁ。。。
I wonder if I ate the sushi…?

By finishing this page, you’ve learned about the various masculine sentence enders out there. You don’t have to know them all, but make sure you take notes and have them as reference so when you see them later on, you’ll be able to know what’s masculine and what’s feminine. As long as you understand what all the above sentence enders do, you can move on to the next page.

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