How do you say “and” in Japanese?
Author: Richard
Q: How do you say the word “and” in Japanese? Or is there one? – Taylor
A: Yet another good question. And this is something I used to make a mistake with all the time when I started, because there are two totally different ways of saying “and” in Japanese and you can’t mix them up!
Luckily once you figure this out they are quite easy though…..
OK, so the first one is like when you say “Cheese and Tomato” The word you need here is と always written in hiragana and pronounced “to” ( or a little like a “toe” on your foot)
Cheese is チーズ – chiizu (sounds a bit like “cheezu”) and Tomato is トマト ( to ma to – said more British than American!).
So full marks to anyone who can figure out how to say “Cheese and Tomato”….
Time starts now!
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Yep, it’s チーズとトマト – chiizu to tomato
Dead easy!
The next type of “and” in Japanese is when you join two sentences together. You can’t use と here. But there are a couple of ways of doing this. One is the grammar “tte form” which I’ll leave for another post…. And the other easy way is to say “そして” inbetween the sentences. The “tte form” is probably better for written work, but when you speak そして is just fine.
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In response to your answer to Taylor’s question, “how do you say the word “and” in Japanese?”, I think I’m right in saying you can also use ‘ya’?
Yes you can indeed! You use “ya” when you don’t know how many words there are in the list e.g. I like sports and cars and …… Generally if you’d write an “etc.” in English then you’d use “ya” in Japanese.