Episode 001: Moving Day

Welcome to the Manga Sensei comic! We’ve worked with native Japanese speakers, illustrators, and our team of Japanese experts to provide you with engaging language learning material for long-term growth. We are very excited to begin sharing our new and improved comic with you. Thank you to everyone supporting us and that helped get us to this point, and for making the Manga Sensei Comic a reality. Lastly, before we go into the grammar, I would like to give a special thank you to Brittany, John, and Yuri who made this comic awesome. 

This week’s lesson is based around a very important, if not key word in the Japanese language. That is the word です or だ. These words are what we refer to as predicates. They show the action/state in a sentence. です is often translated as “it is,” “am,” or “are” and similar words. In short, ‘desu’ simply states that something does or is.

Let’s see some examples:

“I am John.” – わたし　は　ジョン　です or だ。

“He is 2 years old.” – かれ　は　にさい　です or だ。

“I am Japanese.” – ぼく　は　にほんじん　です or だ。 

“This food is sushi.” – この　たべもの　は　すし　です or だ。 

One thing you may notice is that です is always located at the end of the sentence. That is because the Japanese language has a strict structure, and the predicate and/or verb must always fall at the end of the sentence—right before the period. Moreover, you can also see that all of the above sentences are positive sentences in the present tense. We will discuss negative and different tenses in another chapter.

Another thing to understand is that です and だ are the exact same thing, です is simply the formal version, and だ is the informal less polite version. “Desu” is one of the most commonly used words in the entire Japanese language and is what the Topic Marker は is connected to. 

An easy way to use です is by using the simple formula below. 

A は B です = A is B. 

For this chapter try and match each topic (the thing that is doing the action or most important part of the sentence, usually marked with は or omitted because it should be obvious) and see who uses です verses だ . Also, try to see who is being more polite to whom.