how do you say “it” in Japanese?

6 comments

1. I can’t really think of a word that’s the equivalent of “it” in Japanese. If I wanted to say “It’s red”, I would just say 「赤いです」or something like that and just drop the subject all together.

2. I believe you would just use これ、それ、or あれ in place of the subject.

   これはあかいです。
   This is red.

3. In Japanese, it depends on where “it” is in relation to the speaker and listener.
   これ – That/It (right there near us)

   それ – That/It (just over there)

   あれ – That/It (way over there/potentially out of view/conceptual)

4. It’s probably better to approach japanese grammar holistically using the resources in the side bar, rather than trying to find translations of english words like this. Japanese grammar is very different from english, so I think this approach will just confuse you.

   a way to say “it’s small” is “chiisai desu”. “desu” means “it’s” in this context, but it’s not a good translation for the word generally

5. **Extreme TL;DR answer is “you don’t.”**

   —

   The more in-depth answer is that this sort of “placeholder ‘it'” — which carries no real meaning but serves to satisfy the English grammatical requirement of a subject in every (complete) sentence — is unnecessary in Japanese, because Japanese doesn’t require sentences to have a subject to be grammatically correct.

   “It’s small” is just 小さいです。

   “It’s red” is 赤いです。

   “It’s raining” is 雨が降っています。

   …and so on, and so forth. In Japanese, you only need to specify/include/refer to the subject when it’s not understood from context.

   *edited to add*

   A number of people are mentioning これ・それ・あれ in this thread, and I’m not sure why (or rather, I know why, but I feel these replies are missing the point).

   これ・それ・あれ (which I’m not going to get into here) correspond quite closely to “this” and “that” in English, and would not be used in the type of situations that the OP is talking about, where “it” is simply a placeholder pronoun referring to something that’s already known from context.

   これは小さいです and それ／あれは小さいです correspond to “This/that is small” — i.e. when the speaker is calling attention to a certain object, etc. They’re not the equivalent of “It’s small” as the OP is asking about.

   *(edited for formatting and clarity)*

6. The subject more often than not is unstated and determined by the context(in this case a ball). If you’re talking abt general size you would use `小さい(です)=It’s small`and lengths would use `短い(です)=It’s small(in length)`, just add the `です` if you want it to be more polite. But if a noun is followed by `です/だ` it would mean `noun+to be`…so like `車です or 車だ (車＝くるま＝car)` i think the only difference between です and だ is just politeness (だ being less formal). Hope this helps and feel free to check this against a more reliable source like a textbook.

   Note:
   です/だ I think is the closest thing to it is.
   Also, I think adjectives have the verb ‘to be’ built into them so just the adjective (小さい) could mean it’s small.