Page 97 - Basic Japanese

“Soto ni imasu.”
“Ano hito wa doko ni imasu “He’s outside.”

ka.”
“Where is he?”

There are other uses of these two verbs, arimasu and
imasu, which we will examine later. It may help to think of

tag meanings for these words as follows: desu ‘equals,’

arimasu ‘exists,’ imasu ‘stays.’ Note that ‘exists’ is the usual
way of saying ‘(somebody) has (something)’:

Purintā wa arimasu ka.
Do you have a printer? (Does a printer exist?)

2.13. Inflected words

Words like desu, arimasu, and imasu are called inflected words,

because their shapes can be changed (inflected) to make
other words of similar but slightly different meaning. In
English, we change the shapes of inflected words to show a

difference of subject—‘I am, you are, he is; I exist, he
exists,’ as well as a difference of time—‘I am, I was; you are,

you were.’ In Japanese, the shape of an inflected word stays
the same regardless of the subject: Gakusei desu can mean ‘I

am a student, you are a student, he is a student, we are
students, you are students, they are students’ depending on

the situation. If you want to make it perfectly clear, you can

put in a topic: Watashi wa gakusei desu, anata wa gakusei desu, ano
hito wa gakusei desu.