ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the core material of word order and sentence structure which students would expect to encounter in their first year of learning Japanese. Grammar points are followed by contextualized examples and exercises which allow students to reinforce and consolidate their learning. Word order is usually more flexible in Japanese than in English, although there are still restrictions. In Japanese, the predicate always appears at the end of a sentence. The predicate typically describes what the subject is or does. There are three kinds of predicate in Japanese: verb, adjective, and noun with the copula verb. The chapter presents flexibility, omission, uniform word order for statements and questions and placement of noun modifiers. It also presents four types of clauses are as follows placement of dependent clauses, noun-modifying clauses, sentence-modifying clauses, and nominalized clauses.
