3 In sentence (3), "kissaten de" is added compared to sentence (1). "Kissaten" is a noun meaning "coffee shop", and "de" is a particle similar in meanign to "at". You can make sentence (4) based on (2) and (3) as follows. (4)Tanakasan wa Satosan to kissaten de ocha o nomimashita. (Tanaka drank tea at a coffee shop withSato.)As you can see, the basic sentence structure of Japanese has the verb at the end, after several "noun + particle phrases ". Particles mark a noun's role in a sentence. "Tanakasan" is the subject, "ocha (tea)" is the object, and "Satosan" is the partner of the action. "Kissaten (coffee shop)" is the place of the action. These are the "roles" of each noun. The particle after the noun marks the role of the noun in a sentence. Such "roles" of nouns are marked somehow in all languages. How are they marked in English or Chinese? Subject and object are marked by the order of the words, and other "roles" of nouns are marked by prepositions. In Japanese, particles come after all nouns to mark their role. Since particles come after nouns in Japanese, they are called postpositions instead of prepositions. In addition, nouns are often written in kanji, but particles are always written in hiragana. Keep it in mind that hiragana after kanji mark important grammatical information. Above are the main points of Japanese sentence structure. Some people might think it is a strange language, structuring sentence in SOV or using postpositions. However, it is not a strange language at all. Actually, there is a report that says nearly half of the languages in the world have SOV structured sentences. The prominent languages of the world such as English, Chinese, and Russian happen to put words in SVO order, so it seems as if SOV languages are exception, but from a statistical point of view, SOV languages make up one of the two major types of language groups in the world. Further, it is pointed out in general linguistics that prepositions are often used in SVO languages, and SOV languages tend to use postpositions. This means that the languages of the world can be classified into two typical types, one is "SVO, preposition" type and the other is "SOV, postposition" type. Japanese belongs to the latter type, as well as Korean and Turkish. It is not a peculiar language, but it just belongs to "another type" of language. For the people whose mother tongue is the "SVO, preposition" type of language, it may be difficult to learn Japanese, but it brings with it a rich experience and a totally new world to learn a language in that is different from your own.
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