1.4. WORDS AND WORD CLASSES 33
A good rule of thumb is ”if you can say it’s ’something else’, it’s a noun”:
”This car is old.”
”New York is hot.”
”The magnification is high.”
”This ambiguity is omnipresent.”These are all examples where the noun is said to be something else
(and that something else is known as an ”adjective”). This even works
with things that you might think are verbs, but actually aren’t: ”walking”
for instance looks like it’s a verb, because ”walk” is a verb, but there are
instances when ”walking” is most definitely a noun. Of the following two
sentences, the first uses ”walking” as a verb, while the second uses ”walk-
ing” as a noun:
”I went to work walking.”
”I like walking.”We can verify that in the first sentence we’re using a verb, and in the
second a noun, by replacing it with a word of which we know it’s a noun,
like ”cheese”:
”I went to work cheese.”
”I like cheese.”The first sentence suddenly makes no sense at all anymore, while
the second sentence is still perfectly fine. This ”words can belong to mul-
tiple classes, and which it is depends on how it’s used in a sentence” is
something quite important to remember when dealing with Japanese, as
well as learning foreign languages in general.
As a last bit of noun related information, in Japanese (as in English,
in fact) nouns do not inflect. They usually need verbs to indicate negative,
past tense, and other such things: in English we can say ”This is not a book”
or ”This was a book”, but the negative and past tense comes from the verb
”be”, not the noun.
1.4.4 Pronouns.
There is a special class of words in English that act as if they’re nouns, but
are used to replace nouns in sentences. The best known pronoun in the
English language is the word ”it”, but words like ”this”, ”that” as well
as ”you” or ”we” are all examples ofpronouns. Rather than constantly