This week, I will post some basic sentences which are normally used in Japanese conversation. These sentences are parts of our project's section teaching simple conversation.
1/こんいちは - Konnichiwa
It means both "Hello" and "Good afternoon". Notice that the は(ha) character is pronounced as わ(wa) in this case.
2/ おはようございます - Ohayou gozaimasu
This sentence means "good morning". The gozaimasu part makes this greeting more formal. So this sentence is used when you talk with some one you don't know or people like your boss. In informal situation, Ohayou is enough.
3/ こんばんは - Konbanwa - Good evening
4/ さようなら - Sayounara - Goodbye
This sentence is only used when the speaker is going to leave for a long time. ではまた (dewa mata) which means "see you later" is more common in daily life.
5/ 何時ですか- Nan ji desu ka? - what time is it?
Although this sentence use some kanji characters, I still put it here because of its popularity. 何(なん) means "what" and 時(じ) means time (hours). In the internet, there is a very good free Japanese-English dictionary name
Mayjay which helps users look up the meaning of kanji words. It an opensource project written in Java so people can download it for free.
6/ 元気ですか - Genki desu ka? - how are you?
元気（げんき） means "health" and the partical か(ka) is used to indicate this is a question.
7/ はじめまして - Hajimemashite - Nice to meet you
8/ 日本人です - Nihon-jin desu - I'm an Japanese (日本 - nihon means Japan and 人 mean man,person)
The full sentence is 私は日本人です - Watashi wa Nihon-jin desu. But Japanese rarely used watashi (which means "I") in informal conversation.
9/ すみません - Sumimasen - excuse me/I'm sorry.
10/ ありがとうございます - Arigatou gozaimasu - thank you
ありがとう is often used in informal talks.
