Saying where you live in Japanese

Hi All, Long time no see!

Today’s lesson is talking about where you live.

In this lesson we are going to use the verb “to live”.

The root verb/dictionary verb of to live is sumu.

When you talk about where you live, you must use a progressive tense verb. For example, “I am living in Japan.”

To make a verb progressive, we need to switch the -te form and add imasu.

(If you want to a quick lesson of converting forms of verbs see this post)

So “to live” becomes “living”. sumu becomes sunde imasu

Let’s look at some examples:

I live in Japan/I am living in Japan

watashi wa ni hon ni sunde imasu

I live in Osaka, Japan/ I am living in Osaka, Japan

watashi wa ni hon no osaka ni sunde imasu

I live in Melbourne/I am living in Melbourne

watashi wa meruborun ni sunde imasu

Let’s quickly review each of the sentence parts:

watashi I

wa topic marker particle

ni hon Japan

osaka Osaka

meruborun Melbourne

ni direction/to/from particle

sunde imasu living

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