Question – order of words in a sentence

4 comments

1. As I understand it as long as you have the the time expression first and the verb at the end then the middle can be in any order

2. I’m still learning as well. I’ll try to explain it the best I can:

   今日うちに makes no sense and is grammatically incorrect. 今日 is relative time so it can’t be followed by に. Also かえる can only be follow by に. So the answer has to be 2

3. Just like English, you can say some things in different order and they would still make sense and still be grammatically correct. For example. “I’m going home early today,” and “Today, I’m going home early.” I think in beginner Japanese, people are taught to put time first, but that’s for simplicity’s sake. The main thing to remember, as a general rule, is that word order in a Japanese sentence can be in order as long as the proper particle is attached to the right word (and the verb is at the end). There are exceptions, of course (adjectives and adverbs have to be attached to the noun, etc.)

4. Both are grammatically correct. (Though you have an obvious typo in the second one with the double はは.) Folks may be confused because you’re writing in pure hiragana and so aren’t parsing the words correctly.

   The first one is 今日, 家に早く帰ります. The second one is 今日は早く家に帰ります. The only difference is one has the explicit は and one drops it, and the adverb “early” is in a different place. But both of those are fine.

   In both sentences, the topic of the sentence is “today.” The implication being that today is different from other days.