Hana ga saku-Flowers blossom
Hana no Kage-The shade of flowers
Hana ni chikazuku-Approach the flowers
Hana wo Miyo-See the flowers (imperative).

Ga is generally omitted in writing. It is more like the Greek Ge, which is often suffixed to the nominative substantives. Ni is equal to the English to and the French à; but such ideas as the English by or in, or the French en or par, are generally expressed by it. There is another particle wa for the nominative, its position is the same.

Made (until, jusqu'à) and yori or kara (from, de) are also put after the substantives. In fact, all equivalents to English or French prepositions are put after the substantive, and therefore they are more appropriate to be called the post-positions.

In Chinese the idea of time is generally very vague, it is mostly left to the conjecture of the hearers or readers, as the case may be, from the context of the whole sentence. But when it is necessary to express it, it is also done by addition of some words, such as 'already' or 'once.' Thus a Chinese would say, 'John once like Paul,' meaning 'John once liked Paul,' or 'John already come,' meaning 'John has already come.' But this is very different in our language. We have regular declensions of verbs in both the active voice and the passive voice and their form is accordingly changed. Thus, for instance:

Kitaru-come
Kitaran-shall come
Kitarishi-has come
Kitare-come (imperative).

I shall here develop my dissertation a little further, and make some comparison between our language and some of the European languages.

In Japanese there is no gender in nouns, for grammatical purposes, although some words from their very nature signify male or female; thus, for instance, otoko = man, onna = woman, ondori = cock, and mendori = hen. To us it sounds very odd that the Germans give feminine gender to the sun and masculine to the moon, whilst the French do vice versa, or that both the French and German give masculine gender to 'regiment' or 'battalion,' but feminine gender to 'company.' In this respect the English method of dividing into masculine, feminine, and neutral, allowing only on rare occasions, for poetical purpose, personification of inanimate objects, sounds more rational and comprehensible to our ears. It follows, therefore, that our nouns do not modify their forms on account of the gender, and that it is more like English in this respect.

We have, moreover, no number in the nouns. Whereas in European languages nouns which have no number are exceptions and very few, all the nouns in Japanese are without number without any exception. When we wish to express any particular numerical idea, we make use of a numerical adjective in a similar manner as the English would say 'a sheep,' 'ten sheep,' or 'numerous sheep.' Here again we can see that our nouns never change their form on account of the number. It is true, we also put after the nouns ra, tachi, or domo to signify plural, but it is rare, and the style becomes rather clumsy unless it is done very carefully.

Furthermore, there is no gender or number in our verbs. All conjugations are the same whatever gender or number they may relate to. It goes without saying that in Chinese also there is neither gender nor number in its nouns and verbs. It also goes without saying that in Japanese as well as Chinese there is, like English, no gender or number in adjectives. I may also add here that, like Latin, there are no articles either in Chinese or Japanese.