I just recently started learning Japanese, and I came across a video that used
the game animal crossing in a video as an example. The problem I'm facing is
the name of the game in Japanese is

どうぶつの森

どうぶつ is animal

森 is forest

So why is there a の there, Shouldn't it read どうぶつ森?
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2022-02-05T11:26:11.613
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2022-02-06T01:07:31.147
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question
grammar
What does the の stand for in どうぶつの森?
Short answer: not... really.

As user3856370 pointed out, this is a particle, and is の being used to connect
the nouns, and it's extremely important in Japanese. Here it should probably
be translated as "of".

Long Answer:

の is used to connect all sorts of nouns. I'm not going to go into too much
depth because の is pretty complex, but essentially, in Japanese, usually, we
have to use の to attribute two nouns together. I guess you could compare it to
how in English we can say "box of tools" but "box tools" sounds pretty
strange. Here "of" is required to connect the nouns and describe "box"
properly.

The confusion here is probably because it's not out of the question to say
"Animal Forest" in English, and indeed in Japanese, occasionally (and frankly
I don't know when), の can be omitted, but in general, it has to be used.
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2022-02-06T01:07:31.147
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