Fundamental sentence structure and the use of no (の) When constructing a basic Japanese sentence, X wa Y desu is an essential sentence structure. In English, it means X is Y. So if I am introducing myself, I would say Watashi wa Jonathan desu. No (の) is an important joiner between two nouns. For instance if I wanted to say 'This is my cat', I would say 'Omai wa watashi no neko desu'. I learned that 'watashi' is the formal form of 'I', 'ore' is informal, and 'omai' is 'this is.' I also learned that 'boku' is okay to use for 'I' but that I should use 'watashi' in the beginning. I also learned that 'o' is a particle, the object of the action. In hindsight I'm still not entirely sure when 'o' is appropriate to use, so I will ask about that further in the next lesson.