Describing what you're looking for in Japanese

Level A2

Describing what you're looking for in Japanese

You're back at the bakery and you want yesterday's bread, but you don't know what it's called. In Japanese you describe it: 昨日買ったパン (kinō katta pan), “the bread I bought yesterday”. The central idea of this lesson: put a short clause in the plain form right before the noun, with no word for “that”, and the noun comes last.

New verb: 買う, to buy

買う (kau) means “to buy”, and what you buy takes を: パンを買います (pan o kaimasu), “I'm buying bread”. Its plain past is 買った (katta), and the small っ is a short pause before た. Listen to the four lines in two pairs. 買いました and 買います are polite; 買った and 買う are the plain forms friends use with each other, with the same meaning. You need the plain forms here for another reason, which comes in the next sections.

The five verbs of this lesson

The first column is polite. The second is the plain form, the one a dictionary lists, and the third is its plain past. The clauses in this lesson use only these five verbs, so there is no rule to work out today: 飲む becomes 飲んだ and 行く becomes 行った, and you just take them as they are. 働く and 働いた are new forms of a verb you know. The table has no sound, so read the kana in brackets; you'll hear the plain forms in the examples below.

PolitePlainPlain past
買います（かいます）買(か)う（かう）買った（かった）
行きます（いきます）行(い)く（いく）行った（いった）
食べます（たべます）食(た)べる（たべる）食べた（たべた）
飲みます（のみます）飲(の)む（のむ）飲んだ（のんだ）
働きます（はたらきます）働く（はたらく）働いた（はたらいた）

Model: back at the bakery

Listen once without reading. The customer doesn't know the bread's name, so they describe it: 昨日買ったパン. The assistant repeats the same words, and now they mean “the bread you bought yesterday”: Japanese doesn't say who bought it, because the situation does. Later you'll hear ここで働く人 (koko de hataraku hito), “people who work here”, and in both cases the noun comes right after the verb. も (mo) after 人 means “too”: ここで働く人も, “people who work here too”.

Clause + noun: 昨日買った本

Start from a sentence: 昨日パンを買いました, “I bought bread yesterday”. To point at that bread, move the noun to the end and use the plain past right before it: 昨日買ったパン. In English a clause follows the noun (“the bread I bought”); in Japanese it goes first, just as 小さい does in 小さいパン (chiisai pan), “a small loaf”. The whole group then works like one noun, so は, を or です come after it: 昨日買った本はどこですか (kinō katta hon wa doko desu ka), “where's the book I bought yesterday?”.

昨日買った本

Past or not: ここで働く人

With this lesson's verbs, the plain form that isn't past says what usually happens or what is going to happen: ここで働く人, “people who work here”, and 明日買う本 (ashita kau hon), “the book I'm buying tomorrow”. With the past, it says what already happened: 昨日買った本 and 昨日ここで働いた人 (kinō koko de hataraita hito), “the person who worked here yesterday”. Here, ここで働く人 means people in general who work in this place. For one particular person with a job here, you'll often hear ここで働いている人 (koko de hataraite iru hito), with the ている of ongoing actions.

ここで働く人

No word for “that”

English can sometimes drop “that”, as in “the book I bought”; Japanese goes further and has no word for “that”, “who” or “where” in these phrases, so don't look for a particle to do that job. Nothing goes between the verb and the noun, not even の, which links two nouns as in 友達の家 (tomodachi no ie), “a friend's house”. The clause and the noun simply touch, as 小さい and パン do. The noun leaves its own particle behind: パンを買いました gives 昨日買ったパン, with no を. In 昨日パンを買ったカフェ (kinō pan o katta kafe), “the café where I bought bread yesterday”, パン keeps its を because it stays in the clause, and カフェ loses the で of カフェでパンを買いました (kafe de pan o kaimashita). In everyday speech the clause stays plain even in a polite sentence, and です or ます at the end carries the politeness: 昨日買ったパンはありますか.

Your turn, and the summary

You're at the counter again, this time for yesterday's coffee. Cover the lines below. Ask whether they have the coffee you had yesterday, ask whether the people who work here drink it too, then say you're buying the coffee you drink at home; only then check. In short: plain form + noun, nothing in between, with 昨日買った本 for what happened, ここで働く人 for what usually happens and 明日買う本 for what's going to happen. One clause for one noun is enough for now; saying inside the clause who did the action comes later.

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