What do desu mean

This is the feudal, formal way of ending your sentences. You should only use this when you want to make people laugh at you or when you are god forbid role-playing someone from Samurai Champloo.

So, those were a few ways to use the word "desu" in a sentence. There are several others, which I have failed to mention. Because you shouldn't use them. Stick with the first three though, mostly the first two until you've really got them down and feel comfortable using them in different situations.

Watch how people use them on television, or ask your Japanese friends. This is one of the simplest examples of Japanese levels of politeness. Know that there are many many more, and hopefully you can figure out this one so you can start moving on to the others.

Tofugu Japanese current View All Japanese. They are basically super-words that are both adjectives and verbs rolled into one. This is very different to English. These are the polite predicate forms of i-adjectives. So, just as we change the politeness of a regular verb sentence by changing the form of the verb…. Adjectives in Japanese are not always predicates!

This is always the case. Na-Adjective Predicates Given what we now know about the other predicate types, na-adjective predicates should be pretty easy. In terms of meaning, however, they are obviously more like i-adjectives, as both i- and na-adjectives are descriptive words. They do not represent things like nouns do. The result will always look something like this:. You can see that the usage here is similar to that of attributive i-adjectives eg. The other attributive forms of na-adjectives are the same as their informal predicate form counterparts:.

This seemingly simple word has a lot of subtleties to it, and digging into those subtleties like we have here may leave you feeling a bit overwhelmed, but putting these lessons into practice should be much easier than the theory behind it. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Today is Monday. Sushi is delicious. Yoshi ate yakisoba. Yoshi is a student. Yoshi is a student from Japan. Yoshi was a student. Yakisoba is delicious. How to use it, how to pronounce it, and where it came from, plus a bunch of details in between. Way more than you imagined! The copula has a pretty simple job. It connects a noun to a predicate, aka the verb giving information about the sentence. In Japanese, the desu copula is its own predicate.

In its most simple form, we use desu to create a declaration. The pen is blue. You may have noticed the parenthetical on the second example. Tense in Japanese is a sticky situation. For past tense, luckily, we get a nice, simple conjugation. You use it exactly the same way. In fact, Japanese verbs come with their very own conjugations of each tense to create negation.

In this case we get:. Desu is the polite form of the copula.