Welcome to our first Bonus Topic! Every now and then, we'll look at a unique theme in more detail. This could be a deep dive into a grammatical concept, a specific aspect of Japanese culture, or how to get by in real life situations in Japan.

Here, we're going to take a tour of some of the most common Japanese greetings and phrases. A lot of them may already be familiar, but let's focus on the nuance of when to use each one, and with whom!

Well Hello There

Similar to English, the phrase used for greeting someone will change depending on the time of day.

You may have noticed that the final kana’s pronunciation in こんにちは and こんばんは is wa, but it is written with the character は ‘ha’, not わ ‘wa’.

Why is this? In short, these greetings were originally the start of longer phrases. Over time, the rest of it was eventually dropped, just leaving こんにち (a more old-fashioned word for 'today') or こんばん (a word meaning 'this evening') and the topic-marking particle は!

See Ya!

Japanese comes equipped with three common, friendly ways to say goodbye. Notice how two of them end in ね? This is a particle which makes the phrase sound friendlier. We'll learn more about ね as part of a different Topic very soon!

Besides these more common ways to say goodbye, you may have known the phrase さようなら before even starting to learn Japanese. さようなら comes from an older phrase meaning 'If that is how it is...' (左様(さよう)ならば). However, be careful, as it tends to imply that you won’t see someone for a long time, similar to the English word 'farewell'.

Despite this, there is a common exception. Japanese schoolchildren use さようなら to say goodbye to their teachers for the day!

Home and Away

Besides general hellos and goodbyes, Japanese also has a specific set of greetings used when coming back to or departing from home. These are said reflexively by most Japanese people.

The End of the Beginning

With that, we've reached the end of our first Lesson! Through the use of just a few grammar points, we have learned that it is possible to communicate in many different ways.

Here is what we are capable of doing now that we were not capable of at the beginning of this Lesson.

• Identifying what something is with だ and です.
• Presenting it as the basis of discussion, or as additive with は and も.
• Pointing out relation to the speaker in space with これ, それ, and あれ.
• Describing its relationship or properties with の and adjectives.
• Asking about it with か.

For the short amount of time we have been here, that’s not bad at all! In the next Lesson, we are going to be continuing to polish these fundamental skills, and will also learn how to express new things such as specificity, adding emotion, describing movement, and talking about more than one thing at a time.