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How do you express that you want to speak with someone using Kanji? So far I imagine I would us something like マリオ話{はなせ}欲{ほ}しいます。Combining the name of the person "マリオ", expressing a want "欲{ほ}しい", and defining that speaking "話{はなせ}" is what I want.

I think I may need the を or で particles in here, but need to learn more about how particles are used in sentences.

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  • 話{はなし} not 話{はなせ}, BTW.
    – Darius Jahandarie
    Commented Oct 8, 2019 at 23:50
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    Also, in the case you did want ほしい (which you don’t) its polite form would be ほしいです, not ほしいます, because it inflects like an i-adjective.
    – Darius Jahandarie
    Commented Oct 8, 2019 at 23:53

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Your sentence is something like “Mario want please talking” in English.

  1. You don’t want the noun 話{はなし}, you want the verb 話{はな}す.
  2. The verb takes an argument of who you talk with, marked by と. So, マリオと.
  3. To change a verb to express a want of your own, you use the 〜たい form, not ほしい. So 話{はな}したい.
  4. Judging by your inclusion of ます you’re trying to make the sentence polite. The way to make 話したい polite is by adding です (because 〜たい inflects like an i-adjective). So, 話したいです.

Together, マリオと話{はな}したいです。

Putting some words next to each other unfortunately does not result in a grammatical or understandable sentence generally, so I recommend picking up a grammar guide and generating sentences with that as opposed to guessing.

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  • Thanks this is very clear and helpful. What does 〜 mean in front of たい? Also what is an i-adjective?
    – greg
    Commented Oct 9, 2019 at 0:00
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    The 〜 before たい is there to indicate that it only exists as a form which attaches to something before it, as opposed to it being a standalone element you can use. (I.e., it’s a morpheme as opposed to a word.) To be consistent I perhaps should have also written 〜と, although the linguistic/syntactic status of particles is a little gray.
    – Darius Jahandarie
    Commented Oct 9, 2019 at 0:24
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    Re: i-adjectives, I recommend just Googling, but maybe guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/adjectives#The_i-adjective is a good start?
    – Darius Jahandarie
    Commented Oct 9, 2019 at 0:25
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    The first couple grammar books listed in this meta answer are probably a decent place to learn from: japanese.meta.stackexchange.com/a/759/3097
    – Darius Jahandarie
    Commented Oct 9, 2019 at 0:37
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    @GregDegruy that first link Darius provided is part of Tae Kim's "Guide to Japanese Grammar", which is considered fairly good from what I've heard, at least as far as free resources so. Kim also has (on the same website) a "Complete Guide to Japanese Grammar", but I believe its still considered a work in progress.
    – mbrig
    Commented Oct 9, 2019 at 16:30

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