Ne | "...you know?" "...right?" "...isn't that so?" |
Yo | "Yo" gives the sentence emphasis and implies that
you're telling the other person something they don't already know. Because
yo is such an active, emphatic particle, and because you're telling
instead of asking, it's not always polite to use to a superior.
"...you know." |
Wa![]() |
Wa is a hard sentence ending to pin down.
It can lend emphasis to a sentence, or soften a too-emphatic sentence, or
just underline the fact that the speaker is a woman. It's profoundly feminine.
Because of that, men never use wa; if you hear a man saying "wa,"
he's either 1) imitating a woman or 2) speaking Kansai-ben, in which case
his wa is more like a yo. (See the page on Kansai-ben.)
Unlike the other sentence endings, you can stack wa: wa yo, wa ne, wa yo ne. (Never wa ne yo.) |
Na | Na is a strong ne. Macho men use it in place of ne; women will often avoid using it, since it's a little too strong to be really feminine. |
These are the last of the polite sentence endings. The following endings are too strong to be genuinely polite, and as a result, you'll hear them a lot from tough guys: |
|
Ze![]() |
Ze is a strong yo. |
Zo![]() |
Zo is the strongest particle of all. It can add a commanding or threatening tone to a sentence if the intonation is right. |