Ōkubo san wa mainichi shinbun wo yomimasu.
To see how we can use adverbs to add description to an action, let’s start with an adverb-free example sentence:Įvery day, Okubo-san reads the newspaper. You may notice that most of these adverbs were introduced earlier as those that do not have an obvious related adjective. Here are a few of the more common adverbs that can be used with adjectives: A bit We are essentially limited to adverbs that describe degree or magnitude. Just keep in mind that there are a few situations where the adverb might appear slightly earlier.Īlso note that since we are generally adding further description or emphasis to another description, we are quite limited in the number of adverbs that can be used like this. It is therefore beyond the scope of this article. It is possible to place the adverb elsewhere in situations like this, but it’s far less common, and would add a great deal of confusion for very little gain. Kanojo wa totemo omoshiroi hon wo yomimashita. This is almost exactly the same as English, and because of the nature of these words it should be fairly intuitive. When an adverb is adding a description or emphasis to an adjective, it will usually appear immediately before the word it’s modifying. We’ll start with adjectives because they are relatively simple. Let’s look at each of these separately, then bring it all together to see how we can use all three in a single sentence. Other adverbs (which themselves are applied to an adjective, verb, or other adverb).Adjectives (which themselves are applied to a noun).What type of word is the adverb modifying?Īs we saw in the very first diagram above, adverbs can be applied in one of three word types: How we use adverbs in a sentence in Japanese varies according to the answer to this question:
Totemo vs sugoku how to#
It helps to remember these as adverbs because then, once you know how to use adverbs in a sentence, you can easily apply the same rules to use these time expressions in a sentence too, or vice versa. Some expressions of time are also adverbs, particularly those that describe frequency such as the following: Always Here are some of the more common ones: A bitĪmari あまり (used with negative adjectives/verbs) In addition to these adjective-related adverbs, there are some adverbs that don’t have an obvious adjective cousin. As noted above, “yoku” 「よく」 can also mean “often”, and regardless of its meaning, it is usually written in hiragana, not kanji.