To end with, there is a another meaning for じゃ which I’d like to talk about. The expression “じゃ〜ね” pretty much means the same thing, though I don’t think I’ve heard it said as “ではね”. I’ve used this many times in emails before I write my name at the bottom.Īlthough it isn’t negative, it is common to abbreviate this as “それじゃ” or just “じゃ”.
One place you may be used to seeing では and じゃ is in common expressions for bidding farewell to someone.įor example, the expression “それでは”, which literally means something like “And with that…”, is used as a simple “goodbye”. Sometimes this gets shortened to “じゃん” in modern slang, as in the phrase “すごいじゃん！” (“is is not awesome?”) Shortening of “ではない” (is not) to “じゃない”, is just following the same pattern which fits because of the negative meaning. (except for a few cases I’ll talk about below). However, if the sentence doesn’t express something negative, it sounds unnatural to use じゃ. It’s simply a abbreviation for ”では”, although it isn’t interchangeable in all cases.įor example in the above two sentences, it’s perfectly natural to replace では with じゃ, and I would argue it sounds best with じゃ. You may have noticed both of these examples talk about something negative (can’t understand, not enough), and this is one of the nuances of は.
That’s not enough for me to understand! (literally: “With that, I won’t understand”). Imagine someone tried to explain a movie’s plot with a confusing set of scene descriptions which were out of order. Therefore は is necessary.Īnother way では can be used is when talking about a situation or condition, in the sense of “with such a situation…”. I think the reason is because in both cases there is an implication that there is ‘less’ of something somewhere else (less parks in another country, or less characters in another language). Interestingly enough, if we removed the は from either sentence we would end up with awkward Japanese. In Japanese, there are a lot of characters. This can be easily seen when talking about a country or a language. Putting these two meaning together, we end up with introducing a topic which are using or taking action in. The other meaning of は I mentioned above (where there is an implication that other things do not apply) is tightly related to this one, but I think it helps to think of them separately. (More literally, “As for Japan, it has existed since a long time ago”) Japanese has existed since a long time ago. One of the other main uses of は is when you want to introduce a topic in order to say something about it. Here the implication of the は within the “では” is that the person can’t read novels in Japanese, but he or she can probably read something else in Japanese (maybe children’s books?). It’s difficult to capture this essence in the English translation, though in a larger context (in the middle of a conversation or article) it would be easier to include all the nuances of the original text.įor another example, imagine you asked someone if you could get to Hokkaido via train or plane, and they answered:Īgain, the addition of the は means that you probably can’t go via some other means (like train). If we take the functions of both particles and put them together, we end up with using something with an implication about using other things. This implies that the speaker reads novels, but there is probably something he or she doesn’t read (maybe short stories?). One of the functions of は is to imply something applies for the word before the は, but there may be other cases that do not apply. One simple example is languages, which usually have a で before them when you are speaking, reading, writing, or doing something with them. This also includes a location where an action is being performed. Let’s start with one of the basic usages of で, which is to represent a tool or something that being used to perform an action. If you want to learn some of the nitty gritty details of は, you can check out this post of mine. However I will go over some of this quickly in this post. 
I’m not planning on going over all the meanings of で or は when used on their own, as each of these particles can be pretty complex with many ways of using them. To a certain extent, the various usages of “では”can be understood by taking a sum of the usages of で and は when used separately, but in some cases thinking in this way may not be intuitive, so I’ll go over some specific examples to make things clear. In this post I’d like to look at the particle combination で＋は = では (pronounced ‘de wa’) and the related word じゃ (ja).
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