One of the sneakiest tricks that any language can play is taking perfectly good English words and using them in other ways.  In Japanese "no" is a "particle" - a short word that doesn't carry direct meaning but serves as a connector or modifier for lots of other words.  English doesn't use these very much, but a good example is the infinitive "to" as in "to do." 

Japanese, on the other hand, uses particles all the time.  Literally.  I can safely say that every grammatically complete Japanese sentence (unless you consider "Yes" and "No" to be complete sentences) uses at least one particle - usually "wa", which denotes the topic of a sentence as in "Boku wa Eigo ga wakarimasu." (I understand English).  That sentence contains two particles - "wa" indicates that "boku" (I/me) is the topic while "ga" marks "Eigo" (English) as the object of the verb.

"No" is a particle of many uses, but in a nutshell it denotes a relationship between two nouns.  It can be a possessive, indicate a country of origin, describe what something is made of, and so on.  The grammatical form for this is "Noun A no Noun B."  So "glass bottle" is garasu no bin while "my book" is boku no hon.

Every time I see this construction I have to remind myself that this is not a negative statement or denial.

Tags: japanese