Making Nouns Casual
“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” - Tom Clancy
From this chapter’s title, I imagine you’ve gathered that you’re learning about nouns. When you’re making your Japanese more casual or informal, you’re generally changing the sentence enders. I’m talking about the です’s, ます’s, and so on. In this chapter, you’ll be learning how to make the formal noun sentence enders that you already know (like です, じゃありません, でした, and じゃありませんでした) into casual noun sentence enders. It’s quite easy, too – all you have to do is change those things into other things (meaning all you have to do is learn four new words before this chapter is over).
です → a だ
でした → a だった
じゃありません → a じゃない
じゃありませんでした → a じゃなかった
Spend a little bit of time memorizing these four new noun sentence enders. The nice part is that they’re at least a little similar to their more formal parents, making it easier to remember. I’d recommend writing these patterns down so you have them for later. We’ll use these a little bit in this chapter, but most of your practice will happen in the next chapter (where we look at casual adjectives, because casual adjectives are really easy).
So, jot these down, and let’s get through this!