Regarding ellipsis: In written (business) communication, when I deliberately omit a particle, I tend to add a comma then instead - as opposed to speaking, where I do not “think” a comma. I suppose it feels to me to be less colloquial / more formal with a comma. Seems to be wrong, though. 
In any case, I am looking forward to many more interesting revelations on things I have not even thought about before. 
It’s about 50/50 for information known/new information. I think the most helpful one was the statement that a subordinate clause precedes a main clause. I already was used to reading Japanese sentences that way, but having it pointed out means I can consciously strategize my approach to reading.
I wanted to write a few example sentences for every topic of this week as practice. Even though it’s supposed to be for myself, if you find any mistakes I’d be glad if you would tell me so I can get better 
I tried using every (or almost every) particle-marked element which can be a topic and is commonly found in Japanese sentences.
今日、森に私が友達と自転車で家から学校へ道を行ったよ。
Today I walked in the woods with my friend from my house to my school.
今、部屋に分がじっくりとコンピュータで私に書かれている。
Now, sentences are carefully being written in my room on my computer by me. (Sounds kinda weird in English, if this is even right in Japanese. How would を fit in here?)
I try to define a topic inside a topic and carry it on to the next sentence, as shown in DoBJG.
漫画はハピネスは面白いと思う。感情的だから。とくに、雪子というのキャラは最高。好きだ。
For manga, I think “Happiness” is interesting. Because it’s emotional. The character called Yukiko - especially - is the best. I like her.
Yes/No questions.
今、私たちとうちに来ないか？
うん、（あなたたちとうちに）来る。
Particles.
それ（は）何？
それ（は）調子（に）なって負けた選手だ。
What’s that?
It’s a player who got over-excited and then lost.
Clauses.
遊びに行く？
ちょっと宿題があるけどー（行きたいならいい。）
へー、同級生で僕が宿題ないから（あなたもないと思った。）
ちょっと変だと思うんだから（いけない。）
Do you want to come play?
I have a little home work to do (but if you want it’s okay.)
Huh, we’re classmates and I have no homework (so you should have none either.)
I think you’re a little weird (so that’s why I don’t want to.)
私たちは「ん」で始まる単語を見つけました！
あなたがたはわたくしにお教えしてよろしいでしょうか。
いけない、秘密です。
We’ve found a word that starts with ん!
Would you care to elaborate?
No, it’s a secret.
ビル、なんでその人を打った？
俺のペンを盗んだからだ。
あぁ、そのー、えっとー。その人は犯人だとどう知ってる？
情報源は全部でっち上げたよ。
Bill, why did you hit that person?
Because they stole my pen.
Ahh, uhm, soo… How do you that they’re the culprit?
My source is that I made it up.
Direct.
こういちはヴィエトに笑われた。
それで、ヴィエトはこういちに蹴られた。
Indirect.
隣さんに叫ばれているから寝れない。
I’m being subjected to my neighbors yelling, so I can’t sleep. (Is this the correct way of using the indirect passive?)
(I wrote this before reading anything below items I replied to, so there may be overlap with others’ replies.)
(I’m not saying it’s common, though. This was the height of cherry-picking results.)
Ellipsis:
[The core predicate] cannot be omitted in normal conversation …
(In informal conversation … this is considered abrupt.)
I realize they’re talking about responding to a question, but this felt like a challenge for me to find a manga scene where someone is making a statement or request that has the verb omitted.
I see the dropped は and dropped を often in manga, but it’s hard to search for examples of…
What? Searching for something omitted isn’t easy? The nerve to suggest such a thing. 
I know I’ve seen missing particles with spacing and commas as substitutes; I can’t remember seeing it without even those things, but that is probably just bad memory.
Thanks for the examples. 
I’m not here on this community since a long time (compared to my registration date on Wanikani), and I’m still amazed that in a lot of discussion about some grammar points or vocabs you are always there to provide examples in the wild 
It’s really great to have those examples, so thank you for that.
Concerning this week, I finished my reading, since I don’t have any questions and that I’m not good enough to participate in some of the discussion, you will probably see me only next week for the next part 
(I’m still reading what everybody is saying, as, like I said, it’s nice to read).
Here are some of my thoughts:
Ellipsis
This is one of those things that makes it a bit of a pain to translate from Japanese to English sometimes! You can’t translate literally or it sounds strange and unnatural in English. It has been a bit of a learning curve for me to figure out how to translate short back-and-forth sentences that keep the core predicate and little else.
For hard mode, here’s the video (the part excerpted below starts around 1:13). The transcript is from 週刊プロレス and likely isn’t perfect.
山下「でも荒井ちゃんの試合でおしりんさんがレフェリーするのはちょっと狡い。公私混同する可能性があるので、それは無しかな。なので私が試合する時にやってほしいなと。（4月の後楽園だとアメリカ滞在中だが）いないっすね」
Yamashita: “But isn’t it a bit unfair, having Oshirin-san as the referee for Arai-chan’s match? There’s the possibility of her mixing business and her private friendships, and that’s not acceptable. So I want her to be the referee for my match.”
(But that’ll be at the Korakuen show in April, which is during your stay in America)
“I won’t be there, huh?”
荒井「見れないんですか？」
Arai: “Won’t you be able to watch it?”
山下「でも荒井ちゃんは無しね」
Yamashita: “But it’s not alright for her to referee for Arai-chan.”
荒井「配信で見ていただいて」
Arai: “Please watch it on the stream.”
山下「はい、見ます」
Yamashita: “Yes, I will.”
荒井「帰ってきてまだ（青木さんがレフェリーとして）いる可能性もありますからね」
Arai: “There’s a possibility that Aoki-san will still be there to referee when you come back.”
山下「そのまま続ける可能性があるか。それはちょっとお願いしておいて」
Yamashita: “There’s a chance that she’ll keep doing it? Please ask her to do this.”
荒井「説得しておきます」
Arai: “I’ll try to persuade her.”
Personal Pronouns
(2) page 29
The point about how first and second pronouns cannot be repeated in a single sentence was interesting to me, because that does bear out for most of the sentences I see, but I could’ve sworn I’d translated some (spoken) sentences that were pronoun soup… But when I went back to find one, I couldn’t find any easily, haha, so maybe I was misremembering and it was another word that was repeated over and over that made things confusing for me!
(3) page 31
Here it mentions that “a female first name is employed by a young girl as a self-address form in very informal speech.”
It’s possible the answer here is just “pro wrestlers are weirdos”, but I see wrestlers using their own name as a self-address form all the time! It’s especially common with Maki Itoh, who will refer to herself as 伊藤 quite frequently.
I had a long debate with myself over how to translate it, because sometimes it feels like she almost refers to her wrestling personality as a character that is distinct from her regular self… She does tend to refer to herself in the third person a lot in English, too, so sometimes I’ll actually keep it in my translation, even though it stands out more when someone does that in English than when they say it in Japanese.
No video for this, sorry! This exchange happened right after the match in the ring, not in the backstage comments.
山下「同じ気持ちだよね？ なんかアレ、もしかして好き度が低くなってる？ 会わなかったうちに」
Yamashita: “We feel the same way, right? Or maybe, your level of love has fallen? While we weren’t seeing each other.”
伊藤「その言ってることがいかに本気かどうかはね、この後のトーナメントで分かってくると思うから、伊藤は楽しみにしてるよ」
Itoh: “Whether or not you’re serious about the stuff you’re saying, I think that’ll become clear in the tournament, so I’m looking forward to it.”
山下「トーナメントじゃなくても私は大好きだよ！」
Yamashita: “Even if there’s no tournament, I still love you!”
伊藤「伊藤はもちろん優勝したいんだけどね」
Itoh: “Of course Itoh wants to win it, but—”
山下「無視…」
Yamashita: “You’re ignoring me…”
伊藤「口だけの好きとかよく言ってそうだから、あんまり信用できないんだけど」
Itoh: “You say that you love me all the time but you’re all talk, so I don’t really buy it.”
山下「分かった。試合で証明していくよ」
Yamashita: “I understand. I’ll prove it in the match.”
(5) page 32
Agreed on this section showing its age a little. Then again, the DoBJG specifies that third person pronouns are fairly widely used in spoken Japanese, which is what all of my examples are from…
Funnily enough, I initially learned (from textbooks and also Japanese Ammo with Misa) that 彼 and 彼女 are primarily used to refer to a girlfriend or boyfriend. Then I learned from watching pro wrestling that this is not necessarily the case at all!
Looking back through my translations, it seems like many of the instances are used when they translated English-speaking wrestlers’ speech into Japanese, but there are definitely plenty of examples of Japanese wrestlers using them to refer to other Japanese wrestlers that they are (presumably?) not dating.
Here’s the video. It’s probably extra confusing trying to go off of just the transcript alone here, because some of it is in “English” (Yuki Kamifuku coins some new terms…), and the transcript isn’t always super clear, haha. Context: they just faced the American wrestler Willow Nightingale.
(The transcript didn’t cover the beginning)
Kamifuku: (in English) “Maki, I’m so sorry I lost.”
Itoh: (in English) “No, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
Kamifuku: (in English) “I’m sorry.”
伊藤「（しばし上福が英語で話して）イッツオーケー。彼女はね、負けてごめんなさいと言っています。（上福話す）めっちゃ、全身どこもかしこも痛いと言っています」
Itoh: (translating) “She says ‘I’m sorry for losing’"
Kamifuku: (in English) “It hurts! Everywhere hurts!”
Itoh: (translating) “She says ‘it hurts all over!’”
上福「マケチンゲール、カナチンゲール…」
Kamifuku: “I Lostingale and am Sadingale…”
伊藤「彼女はマケチンゲール、カナチンゲールと言っています。頑張りましょうね」
Itoh: (translating) “She says ‘I Lostingale and am Sadingale’. We’ll keep trying, right?”
上福「ネクストタイム、プリーズ」
Kamifuku: (in English) “Yes, next time, next time, please.”
伊藤「もう１回やりたいと」
Itoh: (translating) “She wants to do it again.”
上福「言ってないです」
Kamifuku: “I didn’t say that.”
伊藤「言ってない？ でも負けたので…」
Itoh: “You didn’t? But since we lost…”
上福「ヤリカエチンゲール」
Kamifuku: “I want to get Revengigale.”
伊藤「必ずやり返すと言っています」
Itoh: (translating) “She says ‘I’ll definitely do it again’.”
上福「アリガチンゲール。カエルチンゲール」
Kamifuku: “Thankingale. Imma Leavingale now.”
伊藤「カエルチンゲール」
Itoh: “…Leavingale!”
I find this part a bit confusing: “There is one condition governing the use of third person pronouns: The speaker/writer is psychologically somewhat distant from the referent of the pronoun.”
Doesn’t this contradict the common case of people using it to refer to someone they’re dating (who presumably they are not psychologically somewhat distant from)?
Looking back through my translations, they do appear to more or less follow that. Or at least, the wrestlers using 彼女 (including the translated English-speaking wrestlers, actually) tend to be wrestlers from outside the company referring to an opponent they don’t know particularly well (whereas all of the TJPW wrestlers are pretty close).
In the example I shared above, Maki Itoh and Yuki Kamifuku do know each other extremely well, but I think Itoh used 彼女 to refer to Kamifuku when “translating” for her because she was trying to play the role of a professional interpreter.
For some reason, I thought American wrestlers did this a lot, too. Yet, searching for examples, I can’t find any (outside of a few by The Rock).
I don’t watch wrestling (although my father did all the time when I was a kid), so I don’t know why I have this impression of American wrestlers referring to themselves by name.
I don’t think it’s nearly as common as it is in Japanese wrestling (at least from my experience), where wrestlers will commonly use their own name as basically just “I”, but I do see it occasionally from American wrestlers.
I feel like wrestlers in general probably mention their name at least slightly more than the average person because they spend a lot of time basically selling their next match whenever they’re on the mic, haha, which tends to include “who, what, where, and whom” details (here’s a post parodying what many wrestling promos sound like. Warning for, uh, colorful language). Some of them have catchphrases that include their name, too (examples: “I’m Maxwell Jacob Friedman, and I’m better than you, and you know it!” “Adam Cole, bay bay!”). Their name is sort of their personal brand, so it does make sense!
Maybe your mental image is inspired by The Boulder in Avatar: The Last Airbender? 
I actually did consider that…
Knowing nothing at all about pro wrestling, I’m wondering if this is kind of similar to the thing you see in anime and manga where characters can have a speech style that leans really heavily into a particular quirk (like being super-polite, or using unusual end-of-sentence tags like ぜ) – so you get characters who accentuate the cutesy childish aspect of their personality by using their first name as a pronoun. Or is this something all wrestlers do regardless of their character/style ?
Isn’t that using the surname, not the first name, though ?
It’s very possible! They definitely do play characters, and they’re exaggerated to a varying degree. I’ve noticed that some wrestlers do it more than others, but at least in Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling, I’d say that it’s extremely common.
She will use both! I think “Itoh” is more common, but she’ll use her first name, her last name, and sometimes her full name, all as basically a personal pronoun. I feel like “Maki” might be more common for her to use in English than in Japanese, but I’ll have to keep an eye out, haha.
EDIT: For what it’s worth, I don’t think “childish” is something she’s particularly going for…
I do get the impression that virtually all of the TJPW roster would fall into the authors’ use of “young girl” here and that pro wrestling promos would probably be included in “very informal speech” or at least some vector thereof.
I think a lot of the formal/informal dynamics are a bit different in speech that’s part of a performance. Like for example I would associate the “name as first person pronoun” thing to some extent with idols, and idols as a concept are sort of like “a young woman who is your (parasocial) friend” so it makes sense that even in otherwise formal situations they would speak like a young woman on friendly terms with the audience. I think Maki Itoh’s gimmick being a failed idol is why she specifically does it the most – that character’s sold by her performing the trappings of an idol even when the effect isn’t what she’s going for or other things she does clash with it.
I think ultimately I’d think of it as like… part of the palette one can use to color how you/your character is going to be seen, and in this case it adds some tinge of “young + girl + casual/friends.” So I would expect wrestlers going for that kind of a persona to use it moreso than others. Tam Nakano I would guess probably calls herself Tam a lot more than Aja Kong calls herself Aja, for example. Or I can picture anyone in Cosmic Angels probably using it a lot more than anyone in God’s Eye. And it wouldn’t really make sense at all for Ryo Mizunami since it’s sorta the opposite of an アニキ vibe. And Okada could call himself Kazuchika if he wanted, but boy it would sound strange. Just going for different things!
One interesting example from pro-wrestling is Giulia, who uses ジュリア as a first-person pronoun a lot in her magazine column. I feel like she gives it a slightly more self-important vibe though? Maybe the mononym adds to that sense. But the columns are written very very informally, so I’d say it still fits.
I think what it’s maybe getting at here is less like – how close the speaker is to the person referred to in general, and more like, the slight distancing effect in the context of the sentence? Like the somewhat psychologically distancing effect of the pronoun itself, like if it’s being used it’s delineating that what’s being talked about is restricted to that person over there and the speaker’s perspective isn’t fully abandoned. As opposed to having them be the fully absorbed topic or using a version of “us” or something.
I don’t have any experience with actual speech, but I feel like in whatever media I’ve absorbed the 彼／彼女 as boyfriend/girlfriend comes up most in media I’ve seen in the context of like, “my ~boyfriend~”/“my ~girlfriend~”/“do you have a __”, relatively shallow/juvenile kinds of romance where like “getting a girlfriend” is a big concern. I do feel slightly like it might not fit as well if, say, talking deeply about the emotional strength of your longterm partner or something. (I suppose that’s just complete speculation though).
For what it’s worth that same Giulia column I pulled for reference includes 彼女 twice when discussing two other wrestlers as she’s running down an upcoming card discussing each match. I’d probably say the effect described in the dictionary about them becoming increasingly third-person pronouns has not stopped in the years since.
I guess I wouldn’t think of women in their 20s and 30s when I read “young girl”, but looking back at their actual example, it’s definitely not a child using it…
It might be another case where the dictionary could have been slightly more clear about the scope of the usage, because I don’t think their one sentence on it and single example are really enough.
Yeah, I’ve wondered if the self-important vibe comes across the same way in the Japanese, or if it comes across that way to me because I’m a native English speaker, and someone repeatedly talking like that in English makes you sound like The Boulder.
I’d say that with Itoh, I definitely get a self-important vibe that I don’t quite get when, say, Mizuki does it, or Kamiyu (Yuki Kamifuku). But maybe that’s just other aspects of her character bleeding through…
Oh that’s a good point! I wonder if it started to be used for boyfriend/girlfriend because people were using it in sort of the opposite way (like お前), talking about someone they’re very close to in psychologically distant terms, and eventually the euphemistic meaning became very prevalent.
I guess in a sense, it’s sort of similar to those “His/Hers” wedding accessories, and that sort of thing, though obviously in English those pronouns aren’t automatically associated with being in a relationship, though if you go to someone’s house and see “His/Hers” towels in the bathroom, your first impression will generally be that they’re being used by a couple to signify their relationship.
Going on a slight tangent here, but this reminds me of a criticism I’ve heard about the Yotsuba manga’s English release (from someone unfamiliar with Japanese). It was about how the translators tried to make Yotsuba sound babyish by having her refer to herself by her name.
Those of us who’ve read the series in Japanese know, and those who haven’t but are familiar with Japanese can probably figure, that that’s how she talks in the Japanese version.
But to an English speaker who doesn’t know Japanese, it doesn’t come across the same as it does for us.
Yep, that’s the problem you face as a translator, haha ! It’s why I keep going back and forth on it with translating Maki Itoh…
It does seem like there is at least somewhat of a perception of youth with people using their given name to refer to themselves in Japanese, but it certainly doesn’t seem comparable to the babyish connotation in English. If I were translating Yotsuba, I think I probably would have made a different decision, but I understand why the translators chose to go with what they did.
Side note:
It’s interesting to me that in Japanese, overusing “I” pronouns can be seen as self-centered/rude, so people tend to avoid them, yet there are times when people use their own name as a personal pronoun, which comes across as very self-centered in English.
About this Elipsis thing. If I leave out particles in formal japanese my teacher marks it as a mistake. Therefor I don’t recommend people just to leave out particles.
In informal japanese there is much more leeway to leave out particles. When I use informal language my teacher is not that strict about particles. Just wanted to mention it here.
I absolutely agree with you on this. Basically, I also try not to omit particles when writing. (Your comment was possibly a reply to my post above…?)
In particular in connection with expressing gratitude for something in formal written Japanese, however, it seems to me as if it is (most probably not grammatically correct but in everyday communication) not necessarily completely off if the particle before ありがとうございますor similiar is dropped under certain circumstances (I tried to find an example of what I had in mind and the majority of examples I found was with particle, though).
Here is one of the (few) examples without the particle I managed to come up with. It is from the book “そのまま使える！ビジネスメール文例大全” by平野友朗.
先日のお打ち合わせで身に余るお言葉をいただきましたこと、大変感謝しております。
Of course, he may be wrong or this might be a special set phrase - I am not a native speaker of Japanese, so I cannot judge. 
In similar cases, I sometimes drop the particle as well (and insert a comma instead), up to now, without really thinking about whether it is ok or not. Chances are I had seen it a couple of times in mails addressed to me and simply (unconsciously) copied the style.
