30 CHAPTER 1. THE SYNTAX
The poem, in styleSpecial dictionaries exist that list kanji in their different forms: san-taijiten,
, which list kaisho, gyousho and sousho forms (”santai”
meaning three forms), and gotaijiten,
, which list all five forms
for a kanji (”gotai” meaning five forms). There are even reference works
which don’t so much list the forms in a neatly ordered fashion, but show
you different artists’ interpretation of the gyousho and sousho forms of
kanji, which makes them more ”artbook” than reference book, even when
they are invaluable resources to students of Chinese and Japanese callig-
raphy.
1.4 Words and word classes
With all this talk about leĴering, one would almost forget that just leĴers
hardly get us anywhere if we don’t know any words to write with them.
However, Japanese doesn’t have quite the same words as most western
languages have. You may have heard the terms ”noun” and ”verb”, and
you may even be familiar with terms like ”prepositions” and ”adverb”, but
there are quite a number of these word types, and we’ll look at all of these
in terms of whether or not Japanese uses them, and what they look like.
1.4.1 Articles
This is a group of words that you rarely think about as real words: in En-
glish, ”the”, ”a” and ”an” arearticles. They precede a word to tell you
whether it’s an undetermined ’something’ (by using ”a” or ”an”) or a spe-
cific ’something’ (by using ”the”). Japanese, on the other hand, doesn’t