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The Japanese language is considered to be one of the most difficult languages to master in a short time by the foreign learners, especially as a second language, being an agglutinated language.
The Japanese grammar has three levels, the basic one being the first necessary one for understanding the path of this language.
Compare with another language, for example English, the Japanese text and sentence structure does not have spaces between words, word order in the sentence being opposite to that in English.
Sentence/Word order
Japanese is a S+O+V language compare with English S+V+O.
Japanese English
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私は寿司が食べたい。わたしはすしがたべたい。
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Watashi (S) ha sushi(O) ga tabetai(V).
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I want to eat sushi.
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I(S) want to eat (P) sushi(O).
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Nouns
The Japanese nouns do not have gender, the singular and plural being the same.
Ex: 花（はなーhana）-flower, flowers
The names of places or people are capitalized only if you use the Romanji written stile this applying only for foreign learners, for the Japanese native the usage of kanji making impossible for a foreign learner to distinguish them, without giving attention to the whole sentence. The people names are followed by San or Sama in the formal speaking or writing.
Ex: 鈴木さん。(すずきさんーSusuki san) Mr. Susuki.
鈴木さんは東京に住んでいます。（すずきさんはとうきょうにすんでいます。－Susuki san ha Tokyo ni sundeimasu. (Mr. Susuki lives in Tokyo.)
Particles
The particles little words without meaning used to connect words in the sentence or marked them being always after subject or object but very important in the sentence.
Some times the sentences do not have subject so is better to pay attention to “wa”(わ、は)、 or other word because the Japanese language is very flexible with the word order.
These are some of the important particles: wa(わ), ga（が）, を（を、お）, no（の）, ni（に）, de（で）, e（え）, kara（から）, made（まで）, mo（も）, ka（か）,necessarily for understand the basic grammar.
Ex: 私は花が大好き。（わたしははながだいすき）watashi ha hana ga daisuki .
I like flowers.
Note: the particle わ can be written as は、depend on context or place with different pronunciation the same for を。
Verbs
The Japanese verbs do not have different forms for gender, person or number and are placed always at the end of the sentence. The verbs can change forms by adding suffixes to show the tense or the polite form like masu, desu or masen .In this category enter almost all the Japanese verbs, except for two irregular verbs suru (to do) and kuru( to come).
Ex:今日東京に行く。(きょうとうきょうにいく) Today I am going to Tokyo.
行く(いく) to go(V) and the polite form 行きます(いきます)ikimasu
今日東京に行きます。
This is a brief introduction into the Japanese basic grammar and in order to advance students must handle a variety of language issues in spoken or written Japanese.
References: A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar
A Dictionary of intermediate Japanese Grammar
(Seiichi Makino and Michio Tsutsui)
Internet
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