Brenton
Philip SharpDesu
June 24th 2007 01:25
Desu is a difficult phrase to translate in Japanese, as there is really no English equivalent. The closest that it can be compared to is a final piece of punctuation such as a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark.
Desu is placed at the end of a sentence, where the sentence does not end with a verb.
An example would be if we were discussing a big dog - "Cono inu wa ooki" means this dog is big.
To make this a correct sentence we would end it with desu:
cono inu wa ooki desu.
There are a number of variations to the term. The most important is adding ka to the end to make desuka. This turns a statement into a question.
cono inu wa ooki desu ka.
Was/is the dog big?
The other common adaptation of desu is desuyo, which is effectively an exclamation mark.
cono inu wa ooki desuyo.
Gosh that's a big dog!
Desu can also be changed to deshita. This puts the context into past tense.
cono inu wa ooki deshita.
That dog was big. You can also aff ka to the end (but not yo) to make "Was the dog big?"
We'll discuss desu more when we look at plain form.
Desu is placed at the end of a sentence, where the sentence does not end with a verb.
An example would be if we were discussing a big dog - "Cono inu wa ooki" means this dog is big.
To make this a correct sentence we would end it with desu:
cono inu wa ooki desu.
There are a number of variations to the term. The most important is adding ka to the end to make desuka. This turns a statement into a question.
cono inu wa ooki desu ka.
Was/is the dog big?
The other common adaptation of desu is desuyo, which is effectively an exclamation mark.
cono inu wa ooki desuyo.
Gosh that's a big dog!
Desu can also be changed to deshita. This puts the context into past tense.
cono inu wa ooki deshita.
That dog was big. You can also aff ka to the end (but not yo) to make "Was the dog big?"
We'll discuss desu more when we look at plain form.
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