Building Japanese Commands

Choosing a particle from options is easier than supplying one. From here you produce: fragments arrive scrambled, and the particle is the clue to each one’s role — #buttonに tells you that fragment is the destination. This inverts the earlier lessons: instead of choosing a particle from a role, you infer the role from the particle.

The role does not settle the order, though. The drill grades the order the sentence is written in, the one the examples showed: the verb last, each particle right after its noun, and the nouns in that command’s order. For add that is #buttonに .activeを 追加. .activeを #buttonに 追加 is good Japanese, but it is not the order this command is written in, so it grades wrong.

Most sentences in this drill are longer than a command. They say what the system does, did or did not do, or ask whether it did, so they open with システムは ("the system", marked with は, which this unit does not teach) and end on a verb with its ending attached: システムは #buttonに .activeを 追加しました is "the system added .active to #button". Between システムは and the verb the nouns keep the command’s order, with one exception: put’s command names the thing first ("hello"を #outputに 置く), and its longer sentences name the place first (システムは #outputに "hello"を 置きました).