Japanese — Here, there and over there

Today, I started three weeks of daily Japanese learning sessions I compile by myself. During these three weeks, I have the goal to improve my grammatical understanding, my vocabulary and my list of sentence templates that I can use for communication.

Today, Duolingo repeated on how to specify location in Japanese, so let’s do a short recap. In Japanese, there is four different words to signal location of things in the sense of “here”, “there”, “over there” and finally the ask the question “where”.

These four words are:

We can then for example say

トイレはあそこです。
The toilet is over there.

If we want to ask for the location of an object, we can do so:

家はどこですか。
Where is your house?

Note that one still seems to need the question marker although どこ (doko) symbolizes a question already. The reason for that is still unclear to me.
Edit: The reason is of course, that desuka is the polite form of to be as a question. Thanks to Alvin T. for the hint!

Demonstrative pronouns

These words are demonstrative pronouns, i.e. words that reference a topic of discussion in a sentence. The above mentioned are one of a larger group of demonstrative pronouns that follow a pattern called ko-so-a-do.

The just learned ここ, そ, あそこ and どこ describe locations. For objects, e.g. this book, the words are again following the ko-so-a-do pattern but with the suffix れ (-re).

Now, let’s use this new ko-so-a-do pattern with objects:

これをください。
This one, please.

Hope I could also help you with your learning of Japanese. If something is wrong, please let me know in the comments.