Locative Verbs


Remember how in the lesson on the copula I said that you cannot use the copula to say "A is at a location." The reason is Japanese has two other verbs for doing this. These are the locative verbs "iru" and "aru." Both "iru" and "aru" mean the same thing, but "iru" is used for living things that can move such as humans and animals and "aru" is used for non-living things, stationary life like plants, and abstract ideas. Locative verbs have four possible translations into English, but today we are going to concentrate on only 2 of these. In a locative sentence, there are three parts. There is a subject, a verb, and a location. Location is shown by the postposition "ni." This is the same "ni" as you learned earlier. Besides destination and location, "ni" has a list of other uses. It is one of the most common postpostions after "wa" and "o."

The order of these parts is pretty much the same as the order for standard sentences. It goes Subject-Location-Verb. Let's practice with locative verbs.

Watashi wa gakkou ni iru.
"Watashi wa" is our subject and is translated as "I." "Iru" is our verb, which translates to "am" in the sence of "to be (at a location)." Lastly, we have our location which is "gakkou ni." In the past we have translated this as "to the school," but in this context, it translates to "in school." So this all translates to
I am in school.

My cat was under the chair.
First our subject is "my cat." If it is understood from previous sentences, you do not need to add a word for "my." "Cat" translates to "neko." Since it is the subject, we add "wa" after it. "Under the chair" in English consists of a preposition (under) and a noun (chair). In Japanese however, they use a different method to describe this. The expression "no shita ni" is translated to "under ..," but litterally means "at the underside of ..." Whatever comes before the "no" becomes the "..." In this case, we want to say "isu no shita ni" which means "under the chair." That becomes our location. Lastly, our verb is the past tense of "is," so we need to use the past tense of "iru" which is "ita." Remember that we need to use "iru" and not "aru" because even if the cat doesn't look to lively resting under the chair, it's still animate.
Neko wa isu no shita ni ita.

The tree is by the pool.
The subject of this sentence is "tree." We translate it as "ki" and add "wa" after it. Our location is "by the pool." Again, we use another little phrase "PUURU no soba ni." This litterally translates to "at the area beside the pool." Lastly, we have our verb. We use "aru" this time instead of "iru" because a tree is a plant which is considered inanimate.
Ki wa PUURU no soba ni aru.

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