N5 grammar

〜じゃない

janai

Negative na-adjectives and nouns

Formation

Nouns and na-adjectives go negative with じゃない, or ではない when the register is formal. Politeness is layered on top as じゃありません or じゃないです. Keep it away from i-adjectives, which take くない instead.

Examples

〜じゃない is marked in each sentence. Tap any word for its dictionary entry.

  1. He is no stranger to me.

  2. That's a nice car you're driving.

  3. English is not my native language.

  4. That looks like the work of a virus.

  5. I don't really like the mall stores.

The explanation is ours, written for this site. Example sentences from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), each machine-checked to actually contain the pattern. Furigana is generated automatically, so a rare reading may be imperfect.