Ok, time to finally come back to my promise and talk about prepositions in Japanese.
First problem: there aren’t really any prepositions in Japanese, or at least, they’re nothing like in English. I’ll focus on the spatial prepositions in English, as shown in the diagram.*
In English, when we say “John stands outside the school”, we see the school as the main part of the location, and the preposition outside is just attached to the front. In Japanese this is flipped around. Japanese has nouns for the locations, in this case the noun 外 / そと, and the school is added to this noun attributively: ジョンは学校の外にいる. So in English it’s like you’d say “John is on the school’s outside”.
Sometimes (English) prepositions are used as prefixes / suffixes in Japanese, but this is with compound words, such as 外人 “outside person”, i.e. foreigner. In these cases, since these nouns are compounded of two kanji, the Chinese reading is used instead of the Japanese reading.
Anyways, here are the nouns that correlate to the pictures:
*the temporal ones are arguably even trickier, I don’t really understand them completely myself, yet… Grammatically they work the same, but their meaning does not correspond one-to-one with the English meanings.