Grammar detail: family are people

family are people

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My mastery summary

Consider this sentence, which is the standard Japanese way to say 'there are 5 people in my family':

うちは５

です。
We are a family of five.

Looking at this word by word, we have:

うち (our house / family / home / we)
は (topic marker)
５人 (five people)
かぞく
家族
(family)
です is

In other words, literally this means 'we are a family of five' - quite a different construction to the typical English form beginning with 'there are'. The same applies to the question form - if we wanted to say 'how many people are there in your family?', we would use the following:

ですか。
How many people are there in your family?

More generally, in English, we commonly use sentences beginning with 'there is / are', to talk about the number of people in a family, but a literal translation would sound rather unnatural in Japanese. Consider the following examples:

（

は）

です。
There are three people in my family.

メイちゃんは

です。
There are four people in Mei's family.

These are very natural expressions in Japanese, but quite different to the English equivalent. Neither a literal translation of the Japanese to English, or the opposite, would work well.

Another discrepancy between English and Japanese is that when we use the term 'siblings' (or just 'brothers and sisters'), we are excluding the subject of the sentence - but the Japanese equivalent,

きょうだい

兄弟

includes the subject. So for example consider:

は

です。
I have two siblings.

Notice how the Japanese form refers to 'three', but in the equivalent English sentence we need to substitute 'two'.

Kanji used in this grammar

人

ジンニンひと man

家

カケ house いえや