Japanese Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Japanese language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
How do you say "I have begun studying Japanese"?
I have memorized all of the hiragana characters along with some grammar rules.
I have made sentences on my own but I can't seem to get this right. I have tried this
にほんごべんきょうはじぇました
It sounds weird to me but I'm not completely sure if this is right or wrong
If possible, please write it in Romaji along with hiragana.
Your attempt:
にほんごべんきょうはじぇました
Firstly, I'm assuming はじぇました was a typo for はじめました. Secondly, you're missing a few particles. If you studied some grammar you should become familiar at an early stage with the object marking particle を and the possessive particle の.
Using these you could say:
にほんごのべんきょうをはじめました。
nihongo no benkyou wo hajimemashita.
where the whole of にほんごのべんきょう is the object of the verb はじめました i.e. the thing that was started.
When you see の the thing before の normally describes the thing after. So, what kind of study (べんきょう) is it? It's Japanese study, にほんごのべんきょう. Here べんきょう is used as a noun.
The verb はじめる also attaches to the masu-stem of verbs, so you could use "study" as a verb rather than a noun as we did above. The verb is べんきょうする. The masu-stem of する is し. So "started to study" is べんきょうしはじめました。 The object is now simply the thing we are studying, which is Japanese. So we get:
にほんごをべんきょうしはじめました。
nihongo wo benkyou shi-hajimemashita.
