Hey so i just started learning hiragana and i dont really understand what they mean by “wa being a particle or not”. I originally thought it that way :
The wa in watashi is not a particle
Watashi *wa*, this wa is a particle
But when i checked, i learned that you’re supposed to write it こんにち**は ** and not こんにち**わ** so i dont really get it. Can anyone lay it down for me?
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は is pronounced wa when used as a particle and ha when not.
The reason こんにちは is konnichiwa is because the origin of は here is as a particle. ‘As for this day…’
わ is just wa. It’s not a particle. こんにちはis the exception. Usually if a word has “wa” sound inside it, it is わ
Etymologically speaking, it used to be a particle. There’re a lot of lexicalized expressions that used to be a noun-particle sequence.
Wa as a particle is written は. Wa as part of a word is written わ.
“The wa in watashi is not a particle Watashi wa, this wa is a particle” This is correct.
は (ha) when it’s a particle is pronounced わ (wa).
But in こんにちは, it IS a particle (今日は) it’s just you might not think about it as it’s a fixed phrase ‘aisatsu’.
When a syllable of a word is pronounced ‘ha’, it’s は, but when it’s ‘wa’, it’s わ, as you correctly said.
The は in こんにちは is actually the particle は. If you wrote it out in kanji, it would be 今日は, as “hello” in Japanese is basically “this day [is]”. Same goes for こんばんは.
So the rule (that は is pronounced “wa” when it’s a particle) is technically still consistent, it’s more an etymological quirk of Japanese greetings. I don’t know if that made any sense, but it’s how I understand it.
It seems confusing at first, but you’ll catch on fairly quickly. へ and を are two more, pronounced as え and お respectively.
I’m almost a year in and I hardly think about it anymore.
This video will help
https://youtu.be/7yUXHx2DVsg
こんにちはis actually今日は, which means today, where は indicates that something should be there after this.
Think of the *word* wa as meaning “is” the word wa is spelled は and the sound wa is spelled わ.