Lesson 3 (Pronouns & Noun Modifiers)

こんにちは everyone, hope you had a great weekend. Mine was fantabulous!

Today's lesson is about Pronouns and Noun Modifiers.

There are two types of pronouns; Person and Demonstrative. We'll start first with Person Pronouns:

As you can see it's fairly easy. To say mine, ours, yours, his, hers or theirs, just add no の after the pronoun. For example:

I = Watashi (わたし)
MY = Watashi no (わたしの)

の is a particle (Joshi). Particles are short words that follow a noun, verb, adjective or sentence and are used as indicators. They are only written in hiragana. 

My Advice: We'll learn particles as we go a long and after we've gone through all of them, I'll make a poster with all of them together, so you can use as a guide. In the meantime, visit Japanesepod101 for a simplified explanation.
 
We didn't learn these earlier because in Japanese people do not usually use person pronouns unless they don't know the person's name, so if I was talking to my friend I would use her name when asking instead of you.

Moving on! While English has only This and That as Demonstrative Pronouns, Japanese has three:

これ：Indicates something close to the speaker.
それ：Indicates something close to the listener.
あれ：Indicates something not close to either.

To make it easier you should memorise this formula:
-------------------------------------------------------------
Demonstrative Pronoun ＋ は ＋ Noun ＋ です
-------------------------------------------------------------
For example:

これは　ほんです。(This is a book)

Now what if you already know it's a book, but want to tell us who it belongs to? Well let us find about by learning about Noun Modifiers.

Although in English you'd write the same pronouns with This book belongs to Rasha, in Japanese you use modifiers, because it expresses the noun in more detail than normal pronouns:

この：Same meaning as これ
その：Same meaning as それ
あの：Same meaning as あれ

Now memorise this formula:
-------------------------------------------------------------
Noun Modifier ＋ Noun 1 ＋ は ＋ Noun 2 ＋ です -------------------------------------------------------------
For example:

この　ほんは　わたしのです。(This book is mine)

While these modifiers are used to express a noun of an object or person, there are different modifiers to express places:

ここ：Same meaning as これ
そこ：Same meaning as それ
あそこ：Same meaning as あれ

For example:

ヌーラ：トイレはどこですか。(Where is the toilet?)
ラシャ：あそこです。(It is over there)

That's all folks!