I first started studying Japanese the summer after my first year of college. I was still promising my parents that I would take the med school prerequisites and eventually become a doctor, but I knew going in to college that all I really wanted to do was learn Japanese. I must have had science on my brain because as I started studying, I set up a scientific analogy in my mind: Much like the electrons in atoms, Japanese adjectives and adverbs use particles to form bonds with neighboring words.
Although not technically a ¡°particle¡± in the linguistic sense, the most obvious ¡°electron¡± is ¤¤ (i), the hiragana character that comes at the end of nearly every adjective. Takai (¸ß¤¤, tall), hikui (µÍ¤¤, low), atsui (Ê, hot), samui (º®¤¤, cold), ´Ç¾±²õ³ó¨© (¤ª¤¤¤·¤¤, delicious) and so on.
In my mind, ¤¤ became the method by which adjectives were able to form bonds with nouns in order to modify them: Takai kabe (¸ß¤¤±Ú, high wall), hikui reberu (µÍ¤¤¥ì¥Ù¥ë, low level), atsui natsu (ÊÏÄ, hot summer), ´Ç¾±²õ³ó¨© onigiri (¤ª¤¤¤·¤¤¤ª¤Ë¤®¤ê, delicious rice ball). Just link the adjective to the front of the noun and you have yourself a perfectly understandable phrase.
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