I am going through Genki 1 and was going through one of the reading exercises for Ch. 4 in the back and saw some things that confused me.

お母さんへ今日はともだちと大学でべんきょうしました。
In this part, I do not get why へ is used here. In the book, so far, it has explained that it is used for goal of movement and don't know why it is used after mother. The passage is part of a note that the exchange student left for me host mother.

日曜日はおそくおきました。
The mentioned that the verb to get up does not use the particle を before it. I was wondering why that is, why some verbs have it in front and other don't.

Thank you!

へ here means "for (mother)", as in "intended for", you often find it on enveloppes or at the beginning of written messages.

liasher Wrote:日曜日はおそくおきました。
The mentioned that the verb to get up does not use the particle を before it. I was wondering why that is, why some verbs have it in front and other don't.

を is primarily used to mark objects of verbs, and used with transitive verbs. A transitive verb is one that acts on something else. So here, おきる is intransitive because it just involves the person getting up. The transitive version is おこす, which means to wake someone else up.

So you could say 母をおこしました which means "I woke my mother up."

The other parts of the sentence are not the object -- 日曜日 is the topic of the sentence so it gets は, and おそく is the adverbial form of おそい (late). It describes how the action was done rather than what the object of the action was.

liasher Wrote:I am going through Genki 1 and was going through one of the reading exercises for Ch. 4 in the back and saw some things that confused me.

お母さんへ今日はともだちと大学でべんきょうしました。
In this part, I do not get why へ is used here. In the book, so far, it has explained that it is used for goal of movement and don't know why it is used after mother. The passage is part of a note that the exchange student left for me host mother.

日曜日はおそくおきました。
The mentioned that the verb to get up does not use the particle を before it. I was wondering why that is, why some verbs have it in front and other don't.

Thank you!

I think there should be a line break or something. Okaasan e is not part of the same sentence. It looks like it's intended to mean "To: mother" (as in "the recipient of this memo is my mother").

As for the second sentence, okiru doesn't take o because, just like in English, many verbs doesn't take a direct object. It's the same way in English: I get up, you get up; but you can't say "I get you up", "you get me up", "he gets his mother up", "I get myself up". "You", "me", "his mother" and "myself" would take "o" if this construction was possible, but it's not. So it's the verb's object that takes "o" afterwards, and not the verb that has it before!

Sometimes verbs which do take an object in Japanese don't in English and viceversa, and just like in English sometimes verbs call for a particular preposition ("I'm looking for you"), in Japanese sometimes you have to use "ni", "de" or "to". But it's easy to learn all this from example sentences

Also, sometimes "o" does other things than mark the direct object, which means that in a passive "o" would be kept. But you'll get to that in due time