Japanese particles are great!

I noticed something interesting about the Japanese and spaces.

When writing an email, you might write: “お会いできるのを楽しみにしています” (I’m looking forward to being able to meet you)

If you’re like me and you don’t have Japanese language support on your tablet, you’re forced to transliterate everything into Roman letters. But where do you put the spaces?

I would use spaces like this: “oaidekiru no wo tanoshimi ni shiteimasu.” (honorific-be-able-to-meet genitive-particle accusative-particle pleasure locative-particle doing)

But a Japanese native speaker (if forced to use Roman letters at all) would be more likely to write “oaidekirunowo tanoshimini shiteimasu.” (being-able-to-meet-genitive-accusative pleasure-locative doing)

Both sentences would be pronounced exactly the same way, but when you separate the grammatical particles (no, wo, and ni) from the words they modify, you get the idea that they’re separate words like English propositions. When you glue the particles onto the end of the words they modify, though, they start to look a lot like case-endings.

Rather than memorizing “particles” in school, I could have memorized declension tables:

Tanoshimiwa=nominative (Pleasure does something)

Tanoshimino=genitive (of pleasure)

Tanoshimiwo=accusative (Something happens to pleasure)

etc.

Which it strikes me is exactly how people learn Turkish as a foreign language. So what’s the difference between the “cases” of Turkish and the “particles” of Japanese?