レンタルおにいちゃん - Week 12 Discussion (Absolute Beginners Book Club)

This may have been a bad influence on my part. (Sorry!) I’m looking through Cure Dolly subtitles, and offhand I can’t find where she says が always marks the subject, but I do see where she says:

  • “the subject of the sentence always carries a が”
  • “We know that the main actor, the doer or the be-er of a sentence, is always marked by が”
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I guess it was an over-simplification on my part, and since I had not been exposed to the other functions of が it had not fallen apart so far :sweat_smile:

Looking at it now, I think I just inverted the relation though. Rather than "が always marks the subject,’ I should engrave in my mind the the subject is always marked by が. That should do it!

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That’s me every time I encounter a “new way” to use an “old particle”. “This makes no sense. Lemme look it up… Ooooh, I see.”

Back when I was first learning particles, sometimes I’d see a laundry list of uses. The good and bad is often there’d be notes on usage: “This goes after the verb stem.” “This goes after the plain form of a verb.” “This is used only in this situation.”

Memorizing all this was too difficult (and the worst way to go about it for me). Instead, I’ve been aided by two things:

  1. Developing a better understanding of grammar, beginning with Cure Dolly’s videos.
  2. Doing a lot of reading, allowing pattern recognition to do its thing.

Yup, just switch it around to “the subject is always marked by が”, and you’re set!

Edit: Some people will tell you there are times when the subject is marked by の. Don’t worry about that right now.

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I have watched Cure Dolly’s video about particles [1] [2], and carefully wrote it all down, so every time I encounter a particle that’s being used a little outside of its most common patterns, I try to find a way to fit in the “general meaning” of the particle instead of just trying to memorize “exceptions”. It has helped me immensely!

Right now I am a faithful advocate of Queen が, and every time I see someone say that X is the subject because it’s marked by は for example, I always correct them (in my mind) and do the whole ∅が process. :smile:

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When people say this, in many cases they are “technically wrong, but practically right”.

As you may know, many sentences have the same noun as both the topic and the subject. And if the topic and the subject are the same noun, there is no reason to state both of them.

For example, in English:

  • “About that lost cat (topic), that lost cat (subject) has been found.”
    (Sounds awkward.)
  • “About that lost cat (topic), it (subject) has been found.”
    (Pronoun “it” has replaced the subject in English, but Japanese drops the subject.)

In the second sentence, the topic “that lost cat” is, for all practical purposes, also the subject. But the specific words “that lost cat” are technically not the subject, they’re the topic.

(Kids, don’t try this at home. Only trained professionals should apply Japanese rules to English sample sentences.)

The problem that arises is when someone hears “は is marking the subject here”, and then that listener looks at a different sentence and says “は must be marking the subject here, too.” That’s the big mistake!

Of course, this has lead to the popular example sentence:

「わたしは うなぎです」≠ “I am an eel.”

(Unless the speaker is, in fact, an eel.)

I’m definitely 100% on board with Cure Dolly’s method here. You can fill ∅が into any sentence without a stated subject (and also ∅は into any sentence without a stated topic) to help make it clear that there is unstated information. And that lets you know there must be some context that makes it clear what that missing/unspoken noun is. (I’ve seen instances in manga where a subject being unstated prompted a request for clarification from another character.)

And wouldn’t you know it? Cure Dolly has a video on resolving ambiguity: Dealing with ambiguity in Japanese 3 Laws that Make Everything Clear! Lesson 48

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I am coming from the future.
You were explaining this sentence: 「お兄ちゃんが『レンタルなんて利用されてるだけだ』って怒って…」perfectly and then suddenly changed your mind(?) and started explaining the causative させる. What happened there? :laughing:

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My internal pattern recognition for せれる and させる was really weak back then and I probably “misread” it.

Apologies to the future readers working their way through here =(

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