Video Transcript

YUU ASAKURA: I am going to introduce you "there is, there are" sentences in Japan. Basically, you have the subject here and you use the subject particle "ga" and this is "imasu" or "arimasu." The difference here is "imasu" is for people or animals, something living, and "arimasu" is just objects, and the difference is, as I have mentioned before, Japanese people do not care about numbers too much, so "there is, there are" you do not really have the number so you do not have to worry about that but you want to worry about if it is living or not. For example, I have cats--a cat is "neko" in Japanese so I say "neko ga imasu"--yeah she is living--I mean they are all living. And if you want to specify the number, you can add the number after ga so I will say "There are two cats," right? "Neko ga ni hiki imasu." Do you remember we did counters? Animals are counted with "hiki" so I used "ni hiki" to describe two cats. And you can use how many numbers you want but usually you do not; if it is not a big issue, you do not have to use it so simply something "ga" "imasu" or "arimasu."