On the past weeks my teacher has been drilling us with all the particles and I am finding hard to know when to use what… When I speak a sentence, I can kind of figure out but our last exercise was “given object X, form sentences using all the particles” and that is when I have a blank about it…
I am confident about 「は」but I get all the other ones I get mixed up a lot (「を」「で」「と」「に」「が」「へ」). I have read Tae Kim’s guide but I still feel like I don’t understand them completely! Any tips?
It’s a little bit hard to reply with something that will “help with all particles” if you’ve already read Tae Kim. I think we’d need to take individual questions. Have you tried looking at Stack Exchange particle questions or something to see how other beginners’ issues were handled?
I actually didn’t though of it! (Ironically, since I use Stack Overflow for everything) I shall check it out!
I think to clarify a bit more I would like something to help me identify what is the correct particle in a sentence, but I guess I just need to do more exercises about it!
This is indeed quite a tricky issue for many starters with grammar. There is luckily plenty of information on this on the web outside of Tae Kim’s guide.
I would recommend closely examining example sentences, and practice with those. Particle usage can be quite abstract if you only ‘read’ the instruction, at least that has been my experience. The more you contrast different sentences (preferably native material later), the more you will be able to understad the nuances.
Not quite. It’s always used after the direct object - particles in Japanese are post-positions; they come after the word they modify. Sometimes the sentence can have another word between the object and the verb, or even omit the verb altogether (like, say, リンゴを二つください).
@Ncastaneda Ohh, I never heard of CureDolly! I will check it out!
@tristanletzer Exactly! I feel like I have been explain over and over the -instructions- but I never tried to bake a cake with it, if it makes sense. I shall take a look at more sentences!
Japanese Pod 101 has a series/season of podcasts dedicated to particles that I listened to, you could get the free trial and try that out. If you don’t know very much vocab it might be a little tricky though