細菌 has the following example sentence:
Specifically, I’m looking at the grammar use of:
‘をし始めました’
I’ve seen the ‘~し始めました’ construction as an abbreviation of ‘~する初めまして’, but I believe the ‘を’ particle should be skipped in this case?
In other words, if under the constraint of using the 'する’ → ‘し’ construction, the correct sentence would read:
勉強し始めました。
I could also be incorrect about the strictness of this 'する’ → ’し’ rule.
Does anyone who has more experience have any thoughts?
You can only drop the を if it’s a する-verb because then both would be valid: 勉強をする and 勉強する.
The difference would just be which parts are modifying which.
This video by Sambonjuku at 10:47 gives a pretty good overview of modifiers in the case of する verbs. It’s all in Japanese so turn on captions.
Other than the thing with nouns that can be する-verbs, it’s just like any other い-stem verb. It just looks funny because of the special case conjugation of する.
勉強 can either be used as noun or as する-verb. The を is only omitted when it is used as verb.
But in this case it is used as noun (it gets qualified with what kind of study it is). In that case, it is just a noun + the verb し始める (which is する + 始める like you said) and therefore you need the particle を。
(A clearer translation would be “I started studies concerning …”).
Thank you both for the prompt and clear responses!
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