Yes, I read it and your slight that I’m only just memorizing and not supposedly actually learning anything. Do I need to quote your post again?
I’m sure that she’s a great resource for some learners who prefer to just memorize “grammar points” and don’t much care about how any of this really works.
Was I supposed to take that somehow differently than its plain wording? It’s a pretty brazen and false assumption, too. In what way am I not learning how anything works? And how is the Android teaching me anything more magically deeper?
I think you’re really missing the point here. I’ll make it simple.
I’m not insulting anyone. You’re imagining that.
Some people learn better by memorizing patterns and then applying them. They don’t care why the patterns are what they are. If you’re one of those people, then by all means continue to do that.
Misa’s videos definitely seem to cater to the type of learner that prefers patterns. For example, she teaches “てもいいです” as a single thing, a single unit. She doesn’t explain why it is what it is.
Cure Dolly’s videos are based on the work of Jay Rubin and others and on the way that native Japanese speakers learn Japanese grammar. I’m not sure why you insist on calling her “the Android” as some kind of slight, but whatever. Her videos teach Japanese as building blocks and explain why everything is the way that it is. Less memorizing, deeper understanding.
Let’s stop being off-topic, though. We’re talking about particles, not which YouTube videos are better.
Fair enough, perhaps my ‘after translation’ remark was incorrect, or at the least, it depends on the translation. Nonetheless, my point about は and が commonly being used in the ‘same position’ in sentences, especially simple ones (which are the sorts that beginners first encounter), still stands. In your banana example,
私がバナナを食べる。
バナナは私が食べる。
you had to shift バナナ to the front of the sentence in order to use it in a natural fashion with は. Of course, you could have written バナナを私が食べる, but I think we both agree that that’s a less common order of sentence elements. That’s why it’s confusing: in some (perhaps even many) cases, は and が can substitute for each other without any change in the order of sentence elements. This is no longer as relevant once a learner comes into contact with more complex sentences including relative clauses, but by that point, the learner will probably have some idea of how the two particles are different.
This certainly sounds like a possible way to distance は and が in a student’s mind. However, I think the reason this is rarely done is that は is probably one of the most common (if not the most common) particle in Japanese, and it would be extremely handicapping for a student not to have it in his/her repertoire. In addition, as mentioned previously, when I started learning Japanese, I was thoroughly aware of the fact that
が is often called the ‘subject marker/particle’
は is known as the ‘topic particle’
は can be approximated by ‘as for’ or ‘with regard to’ or any other structure with such a nuance
because I dabbled in Japanese grammar before starting to study the language. Moreover, my textbook (which is written in French, so I shan’t cite it here since it’s probably unreadable for most people on the forum) consistently (for over 80 lessons of 98, I can safely say) provided literal translations of the Japanese in which は and が were always labelled differently: は as [theme], [emphasis] or [contrast], and が as [subject]. Even with all that, I couldn’t help but ask my friend – who is fluent –, ‘What exactly is the difference between は and が?’ The reason? I couldn’t help but notice that I could often got a perfectly intelligible sentence by swapping は and が without changing anything else in the sentence, and that the sentence element marked by は could in fact be called the subject of the sentence. Before you go jumping down my throat demanding that I admit that this is the result of my poor grammatical understanding or of my textbook’s lousy explanations (in spite of the fact that my textbook followed your model of teaching particles pretty closely, order of introduction aside, since it was filled cover to cover with example sentences and consistently differentiated the particles), I’d just like you to consider your nationality example:
私がアメリカ人です。 (I am an American)
私はアメリカ人です。 (As for me, I am an American)
We can’t deny that, even with knowledge of the fact that the two particles are different, 私 looks like it can be both a topic and a subject, and the difference in meaning is not clear, even if we use the fairly literal translations that I proposed at the side, because ‘as for’ sounds contrastive/exclusionary even though は is not always contrastive (and certainly isn’t if this sentence is being used in isolation, like in a self-introduction). It gets even more confusing when verbs are involved since, to an English speaker, a verb always has an explicit subject, and even to a Japanese speaker, a verb must have a subject, even if it’s just implied by context. Thus, the question becomes ‘if there’s a topic here, then who’s doing the action?’ The answer is often ‘the person/thing mentioned as the topic’, which then leads us to this question: ‘isn’t that the definition of a subject?’ Knowing that one marks the ‘topic’ and the other the ‘subject’ and telling oneself that doesn’t make the confusion go away. It’s impossible not to notice these similarities. That’s the reason ‘as for’ and the like don’t suffice: は isn’t as simple as a ‘topic’, and English speakers – at the very least – need to be taught exactly how は and が are different. As displeasing as this may sound, with all due respect, I think my experience shows that your proposition won’t work, because it didn’t work for me in spite of my tendency to pick out patterns and my desire to learn using building blocks and not by rote.
I notice that you did not respond to the one thing I cited which answers – and I dare say, refutes – this duality being under the umbrella of the ‘subject’ function. The duality of usagedoes exist, but that does not mean these things are ‘subjects’. The reason is that your conception requires that these ‘certain classes of words’ (as you said) be interpreted differently in order to allow が to continue to be construed as the ‘subject’. Without further ado, since it’s possible that my post got lost in the thread and that you haven’t read it as a result, I will once again cite what a well-respected Japanese monolingual dictionary has to say about the matter:
As such, in examples such as
(I added 私が for illustrative purposes)
私 – or whoever’s presence is implied by context – is the subject. バケモノ is the 対象 i.e. the ‘target’ of someone’s fear. The two が’s are distinct in function. This was also mentioned by @Leebo much earlier in the thread, if my memory serves me. Again, this is not something I’m making up, and is not an approximation made by a foreign learner; this is from a dictionary written by native speakers, for native speakers. が can be construed as a ‘subject marker’ for the purpose of having an easily-remembered summary of its function, but it’s not as simple as that.
For your information, because I already speak Chinese fluently, I avoid translating kanji as much as possible since I already know what they mean and can often deduce their meaning from context. Furthermore, even though my textbook functioned using parallel translations in order to aid learner comprehension, I very rapidly abandoned referring to the translations because my objective was to think and comprehend sentences in Japanese as quickly as possible, and so I only looked at the translations provided if I was unable to parse the sentence no matter how hard I tried. As self-important as this might sound, I think I am one of the last people on the this thread to whom you should be saying, ‘Don’t let the English translation get in the way of the Japanese!’ I don’t even translate when I read Japanese now unless, again, I’m at a loss as to how to comprehend the sentence. The only reason my WK level is so low is that I’ve never used the programme because I don’t need it: I already know how to understand, read and write kanji.
Translation has nothing to do with what I said. Function is everything: for example, the elements marked by が for potential verb forms that are not performing the relevant action are indeed subject to said action, meaning that they are, by definition, ‘objects’ or ‘targets’ of those verbs. They are not subjects. I refer you back to definition ② of what I cited from 大辞林 above: this would be an example of 「能力[…]の対象」. Perhaps you should consider the possibility that the person who is not seeing the correct sort of duality is not me, since even respected Japanese sources state that these two usages of が (subject and target marking) are separate. In other words, が has (at least) a dual function, and in fact, the definition lists many more functions below the two that I cited.
@nclbk already provided you with an example of a な-adjective that does not function as a noun on its own, and which needs to be nominalised for this purpose: 静か. As I said, my test of ‘noun’ character is this:
Try it. Can you say 「好きが…」and construct a grammatically correct sentence with it as a the subject without using quotes like this: ’ “Liking” is/does…'? The answer is no. And even if it actually worked for 好き, that would just be an exception, since it doesn’t work for other な-adjectives like 静か.
Your second sentence is grammatically incorrect. 魔法 is a の-adjective and a noun, not a な-adjective. If you think I’m quibbling, look it up. For that matter, の-adjectives are another class of words that look like nouns, but which can’t act as subjects: try making a sentence starting with 「普通が…」. Doesn’t work, does it? Again, I’m not making this up. If you need me to quote an authoritative Japanese source for you, I can photograph the relevant lesson in the Tobira textbook.
I’m pretty sure I’d know how to explain such things, since the concepts do in fact exist (e.g. distinctions such as new/old information, specific/arbitrary, known/unknown for definite/indefinite articles); they just don’t have a tangible form in the other language. However, that’s beside the point. The reason I brought up the fact that native teachers of Japanese ‘need to be taught to explain the difference in great detail’ and the fact that someone wrote to the National Diet Library asking for a primary-school-level explanation is that if the difference is as clear and simple to teach as you suggest, then it should be crystal clear in native speakers’ minds what the difference is, and they should be able to give very illustrative examples even if they can’t put the difference into words. You said that the difference is clear in ‘real Japanese’, after all, so native speakers shouldn’t have the same misconceptions as we do. For that matter, if the difference were so clear, they would probably simply be shocked when people ask what the difference is and instantly tell us that there is no way the two could possibly be confused, as you have done. However, articles have been written about this, even for the sake of aiding aspiring Japanese writers, and so it is clear that the difference, strangely, is not clear, even to native speakers.
At the end of the day, I leave you to make your own decision as to what cognitive models you wish to preserve for your Japanese learning: if you’re able to construct sentences with な-adjectives (or as they’re known in one way in Japanese, 形容動詞=adjectival verbs, if you prefer) correctly and use が and は to express yourself freely and accurately, I’m happy for you. However, dismissing legitimate confusion as something due to inferior teaching, even when people who have been taught with highly consistent methods that clearly differentiate the two concepts face the same problem; and even dismissing Japanese sources and questions raised by native speakers themselves… these are the reasons some of us on this thread feel that your statements are insulting or derogatory, even if you had no intention to attack or offend anyone. I leave all this for your consideration, and will no longer attempt to impose my model on you, even though it is shared by authoritative Japanese sources and does not require shoehorning. I wish you a good day, and hope that you progress rapidly in Japanese.
Simply repeating your opinion doesn’t make it right. You provide no reasoning as to why nominal adjectives would in fact be nouns, you just say it doesn’t make sense to call them adjectives. In order to show that two words belong to the same word class, you would have to provide examples in which they behave in the same way, occur in the same syntactic environments, undergo the same processes etc.
You dismiss the example of nominal adjectives taking the nominalization suffix –さ without an explanation. If 静か and 男 are both nouns, why can one be nominalized with –さ and the other cannot? If they are both nouns, why can we say 静かそう but not *男そう? And why can we combine one with adverbs of degree, e.g. すごく静か or かなり静か, but not the other (*すごく男, *かなり男)? And why is it that 静か behaves like 高い in all three instances (高さ, 高そう, すごく高い) and unlike 男, yet 静か and 男 belong to the same word class, with 高い being separate?
Conversely, if 静か were a noun like 男, it would have to be grammatical in the same environments that 男 and other nouns occur in. Apart from the obvious difference that 男 can be modified by an adjective (優しい男, 有名な男) while 静か cannot, why can we say あの男は but not *あの静かは if both words belong to the same class?
So claiming I’m a parrot that isn’t learning anything was a compliment? Riiiiiiight… A backhanded one, maybe.
No she doesn’t. The video in which she covers it actually breaks it into its constituent parts to teach it. She in fact does the opposite of what you claim and points out how it is not just one ‘unit.’ This is exactly what I mean with your wrong assumptions.
I’ve watched dozens of her videos and I’ve read Rubin’s book. Despite the clickbaity titles to her video, you aren’t learning some magical secret with CD that you think you are. And to be honest, I’ve internalized things much better with other resources like Misa’s over CD. This is the problem I have with many of the CD acolytes in that they have this weird elitism around how they learn Japanese and this notion that anyone else learns wrong or in some way to mock (I’m actually learning you’re just memorizing). It’s so bizarre since you honestly don’t actually know anything about what I have and have not actually learned.
CD uses ‘even though’ vs ‘even if’, but that’s essentially just a nitpicky distinction. So exactly what is wrong in which the way Misa teaches てもいい as an expression? Are you saying it doesn’t mean rather literally 'Is it okay/good even if [I] do [verb]" as a combination of multiple things? Because I’m pretty sure that’s a perfectly correct way to teach the expression and explains how all the constituent pieces work. I would love to hear about how I learned てもいい incorrectly (and subsequently had my Japanese ruined to quote the Android) and the magically better way that CD uses if such a thing exists, though.
We’ve already covered this with a valid source (DoBJG):
Using my modest understanding, I make the following arguments:
Changing 食べる to 食べたい makes it a transitive adjective, which allows が to mark the direct-object. It being transitive REQUIRES that it has a direct object, whether explicit or implied.
Once the above point is grasped, saying 「たこ焼きが食べたい。」means “eat-want inducing” feels like unnecessary mental gymnastics, especially because we actually have a semantic function in Japanese for “inducing” an action or behavior (causative form). There’s nothing wrong with saying 「たこ焼きが食べたい。」means "[I] want to eat Takoyaki.
I think that’s right. I mentioned the same thing in my アメリカ人 example. I think that presenting both は and が very early and in such similar sentences is the primary cause of confusion. Better to stick with が for a few lessons before introducing は and to keep the “as for …” construction for a while, too. That should help to lessen the confusion in most cases, I think.
Apologies for breaking your long paragraph, but I think I have to. First, I’d actually be interested to see how Japanese is taught to French speakers vs. English speakers. Could you share the name of your book? I would be even more interested to see how Japanese is presented to German speakers, if anyone has a recommendation.
Anyway, は is indeed marking both the topic and the subject in the second sentence. This is what I like about Dr. Jay Rubin (and by extension, CureDolly’s) “null が” model. When introducing は, we need to remind students that the が is still grammatically there. After all, this is a valid sentence.
私は私がアメリカ人だ。
Nobody would ever say that normally, but of course, they could. In this sense, using は to mark the subject is somewhat of a shortcut that works when the subject and topic are the same. Better to present it this way, I think. By analogy, we can also show when は shortcuts を or に or some other logical particle.
Unfortunately, I’ve never seen a beginners resource or textbook do this. As far as I know, CureDolly is the only one teaching this way online. And I think Rubin’s retired.
Anyway, は is inherently exclusionary. Contrast to も, which is not. In saying 私は, you’re automatically excluding anyone that isn’t you from what follows. That’s another concept that’s usually ignored by beginner resources, though I suppose that I can see why.
Well, maybe, but you had some ideas about Japanese grammar before you began to seriously study it. Also, I’m not sure that your book did quite what I described. Just the same, everyone learns differently. You asked me how I’d teach the ideas and I offered my suggestions. If they don’t work for you, then of course you should try something else.
I do apologize if I missed something. There were a lot of long posts to get through yesterday and I was rather distracted elsewhere. I’ll omit the nested quote because the preview panel is complaining about it.
I rather intentionally didn’t add a 私が to those examples. In the second example, you’re correct that 私 is the subject. But why must that be so in the first example? I don’t think that it is. I think that 化け物 is a fine subject. If I had written 「化け物が青い。」, would you have insisted on inserting the 私が? Or did you only do that because the monsters have to be scary to someone, whereas they can be blue, regardless of whether anyone notices?
I think this is the real problem that keeps popping up in this thread. The idea that everything has to be about me, or someone else, or something that can have subjective opinions. But, that’s an arbitrary rule. There’s no reason why 化け物 can’t be the subject of the sentence. In fact, 化け物 is the subject of the sentence. Even in English, it’s the subject of the sentence. Where’s the confusion?
I’m not disputing that 大辞林 lists a separate entry for this use case, but I am denying that this second use is somehow not still the nominative subject of the sentence.
I didn’t even notice your WK level. I don’t care what level you are. I’ve been level 37 for a couple of years, at least! I just kind of stopped doing WK at some point. It didn’t seem to help me much.
But the translation is what keeps getting in the way throughout this thread. That’s why we have problems with 好き, which doesn’t have a nice, easy translation in English. We get the same problem with たい. And, we get the same problem again with potential verbs. They’re all the same problem. In English, something that is subjective or something that speaks to a personal ability works best with a thinking actor. A person, an animal, and so on.
I can read. (私が読める。)
I can read that book. (私があの本を読める。)
But, even English allows the book to become the subject.
That book is readable. (あの本がよめる。)
Japanese just prefers the later form. English prefers the former. But in what way is “book” not the subject in that last sentence? Of course, it is.
This is off-topic, of course. We should be focusing on が. I’ll simply repeat what I said before. If it acts like a noun 99% of the time and an adjective 1% of the time, I’m going to call it a noun or, perhaps, an adjectival noun. I’m certainly not going to call it an adjective.
Also, you can easily do it for 静か.
静かが好きだ。
Sorry about that. You’re right. 魔法 is a noun. It’s certainly not a の-adjective or whatever nonsense, though. It’s a noun. It uses the genitive の to modify another noun, just like any other noun would. It behaves exactly like any other noun in all other syntactic ways. If you want to claim that some nouns don’t work as a subject, well, OK, sure. That’s fine. They’re still grammatically nouns.
We should stop with the nouns, though. Let’s focus on が. We can talk about nouns somewhere else. Maybe we’ll play with 不思議. That’s a fun one!
I seriously doubt that any articles exist to explain the basic functionality of が and は to native speakers of Japanese. If they do exist, then they’re probably written to aid them in understanding why the concepts might be difficult for foreign learners to grasp and how to get over those hurdles.
I also have no doubt at all that articles exist to explain fine nuance of は and が to native speakers of Japanese. But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about whether が always marks the grammatical subject and it does. I’m pretty sure that very few Japanese speakers would be confused about that.
Of course, I mean no insult. And of course, you do whatever works for you! I would never wish otherwise. If it’s easier for you to play gymnastics and let particles mark different grammatical components of sentences depending on which kinds of nouns and verbs are used, then by all means, do it that way. I don’t understand the appeal, but that’s just me. As for authoritative Japanese sources, well, 大辞林 sure is. But so is Dr. Rubin, I’d say.
If you insist on comparing things, then why can I put だ after 静か and not after 高い? Why do I need a な to say 静かな男 but not 高い男? See, they aren’t adjectives, either.
I think you’re misstating what I wrote, though. I wrote that so-called な-adjectives behave like nouns in almost all cases and like adjectives in only a few cases. So, it makes more sense to think of them as a special class of nouns (adjectival nouns, perhaps) than to think of them as a special class of adjectives. I’m not sure why you need me to explain my position further.
Who said anything about compliments? Why are we even talking about compliments and insults? Look, some people learn better by memorizing patterns. Other people learn better by breaking things down into pieces and putting them back together again. I obviously prefer the later method, but I don’t really care if you prefer the former. As long as it works for you, go for it. I’m not sure where the “insult” and “compliment” stuff is coming from.
I just watched the asking permission video (lesson #23) to confirm what I thought. I misspoke, but only somewhat. She does get to the correct meaning of てもいい and she does show you how to form it, but she doesn’t really explain why it’s using も. Or maybe she explained that in a previous lesson? Sure, that’s possible.
I think that you could do far worse than Misa for some topics, but her は vs. が video falls into the same traps as the others and requires you to memorize a whole bunch of separate use cases that are vague and confusing instead of just using the particles in a regular, logical way.
But, again, if it works for you, then by all means.
I’m not sure why you keep writing things like this. Who said anything about a secret? I have Dr. Rubin’s book on my desk right now. If it’s a secret, then why was is published in book form and sold to the general public? CD has a weird character and says weird things, but who cares? I watch it for the simple explanations, not for all the background silliness. Look, you do you. But, stop implying some kind of insult where none existed. You’re just making up nonsense now with “elitism” or whatever.
In the end, what matters is how Japanese works. If you have a good example of が not marking the nominative subject of a sentence or clause, then by all means, present it. But don’t tell me that it’s marking the object of a sentence because an adjectival noun is really a passive verb in English or whatever. That’s just not how any of this works.
I was asking for an explanation because you claim that nominal adjectives behave like nouns “in almost all cases” without actually providing any examples of syntactical environments that would show that this is indeed the case. Simultaneously, you don’t address any of the examples that are presented to you in which 静か most certainly does not behave like a noun but like an adjective, both syntactically as well as derivationally.
First of all, no one is saying that canonical and nominal adjectives are the exact same, which is the very reason why people usually refer to them as い- and な-adjectives. We wouldn’t need two separate terms if there were no difference, but the difference between them is their inflectional paradigm, not their word class. They inflect differently, but they still inflect for the exact same categories (and, as illustrated previously, occur in the same syntactic environments).
The terms canonical and nominal adjectives (e.g., Nishiyama, 1999) aim to address exactly that difference, i.e. that adjectives ending in –い form a predicate without a copula, whereas the so-called な-adjectives attach a copula to their nominal root. Both of these adjectival categories together form a natural class that modifies nouns, which is what adjectives do crosslinguistically.
The idea that all words belonging to a word class have to inflect in the same way is wrong. There are plenty of languages in which there are classes of adjectives that follow different inflectional patterns, e.g. Greek.
I think that the important phrase here is the direct object in English. That may be so, but it’s not the direct object in Japanese. That would be marked by を, as I’ve demonstrated elsewhere in this thread.
If you start letting が mark objects and は mark subjects, then you have to start memorizing all kinds of different rules for transitive vs. intransitive, stative vs. not, “passive” vs. active, etc. Or, you can just recognize that が really is marking the subject in the sentence and work from there. The direct English translation isn’t always nice, but that’s OK. It doesn’t have to be. I’m not sure why anyone would even expect it to be! Surely, translating English directly into Japanese doesn’t work so well, either.
I guess I’ll say it this way. Do we agree that a sentence needs a subject? Something that is doing or being? If so, then consider this sentence.
コーヒーが飲みたい。
There’s no 私 or other I pronoun anywhere in that sentence, right? So, I can’t possibly be the subject of that sentence. And 飲みたい can’t be the subject because it’s an adjective modifying a verb and it’s at the end of the sentence. So, the only thing that can be the subject is コーヒー.
Either that, or Japanese sentences don’t need subjects.
I mean, Japanese linguists exist, just like English linguists exist. There are plenty of articles in English for English speakers on basic things like a and the and how they are used, even though we always use them instinctively correct. For example, here are a whole bunch of articles on basic Japanese, written in natural Japanese, at a very high level of detail, by just a random person (they say they work IT).
That’s easy. The subject is implied, “「I」 want to drink coffee”, or whatever the prevailing topic or subject is that has been previously established in the conversation. If that didn’t exist, why would we even be talking about “wanting to drink coffee”? This is also far easier to understand than adding some meaning to 〜たい that isn’t really there.
Even in this sentence:
You are implying that the Takoyaki is eat-want-inducing to someone or something. It’s much more straightforward to accept that someone or something wants to eat the Takoyaki.
…Yeah, it’s a well established fact that Japanese sentences can just be a verb, with everything else implied. Ironically, by asserting that the subject must be explicitly stated and marked in a Japanese sentence, you are actually the one that is conflating English and Japanese linguistics.
You seem to be very invested in your approach, which is fine, but there’s no need to argue against the use of established, well documented, and linguistically sound explanations. You totally skirted the fact that these words were given a transitive classification, linguistically, which REQUIRES an explicit or implied direct object. People who make a living in the study of Japanese language have sat down and analyzed these words for years and this is how they explain it. It’s not much of a stretch to accept that particles are multi-functional, as this also appears commonly in Japanese.
You wrote an exceeding condescending and elitist statement about how I learn based on your, admitted below, completely false assumptions. So, yeah, I did take it as an insult. Your plain language was quite obvious in what your intent implied.
Why should I bother explaining further? You’ll just continue to spin whatever I post to fit whatever narrative you need. But, yes, of course she explains how も works as her videos build upon themselves. So now that you’ve admitted that she teaches it correctly, do I get ordained as having actually learned what the expression means?
This is also some weird form of argument tactic. You make unfounded assumptions and statements but then make it so that I have to disprove you. Why not instead that you inform yourself before you speak?
No it doesn’t. I didn’t have to memorize anything. The vast majority of examples she gives simply helped to internalize it. Even when wrong, you still have to add these backhanded digs.
Yeah, this is all you had to post without all the elitist “I’m actually learning things” gobbledegook.
Who said anything about secrets? The title to CD’s own videos? Do I need to quote them for you? You don’t even have to go far to find examples of this. From her second lesson on grammar:
Lesson 2: Core Secrets. Japanese made easy - unlocking the “code”. Learn Japanese from scratch
In this playlist alone ‘secret’ is used in twenty-two of the titles:
So, yeah, I can’t possibly understand where I got this notion that she’s teaching ‘secrets’ from.
I don’t feel like I need to present you with anything because you’ll simply dismiss it like you do with anyone else because you’ve convinced yourself that you’re the only one who is correct. At this point, there’s really no more need for me to even participate so I’m just muting this topic.
I’ve been following this topic along pretty closely, since I enjoy these kinds of discussions. To be honest I still consider myself a beginner so I don’t know who has it right. But there is something I’d like to add.
To me, the dictionary definition of what Jonapedia linked to a few posts back seems to have it right. You refuted his point by saying that the 私が in
私がバケモノが怖い。
isn’t necessary and that バケモノ is the subject. But to me, it seems like a perfectly valid sentence even with 私が (even if it is rather explicit). If we consider that its grammatically correct, then what is the subject? It certainly can’t be both, so either way, we have one が that is not marking a subject. This が would fall under the use case that the dictionary refers to.
If this sentence is too ‘abstract’ we could also use something else like:
誰が魚が好きですか？
What would you consider the subject in this sentence? I would say its だれ, which is marked by が, so what does the other が mark? It must be something else.
So maybe the rule is: a subject is always marked by が but not every が marks a subject (but it often does)?
This is about as simple as it gets when it comes to が’s usage as a particle (meaning the conjunctive usage is not covered in this explanation).
After much contemplation, I think I’ll extend an olive branch to @Kwami and say that if someone wants to interpret the items marked with ( E ) as a subject, that’s a fair interpretation in that it requires about as much flexibility to interpret the same marked item as a direct object. Whichever way works for an individual is really what matters here. Assuming the reader is a native English speaker, our language faculty has probably organized itself slightly differently than a Japanese speaker. I don’t see it as a difficult thing to understand it the way I learned it, @Kwami doesn’t see it as a difficult thing to understand it how they learned it. I don’t think about any of this stuff when using Japanese. You just need to be able to understand it long enough to develop speech patterns that you can use subconsciously. The rules will eventually fade to the background.
). It’s so bizarre since you honestly don’t actually know anything about what I have and have not actually learned.
I would love to hear about how I learned てもいい incorrectly (and subsequently had my Japanese ruined to quote the Android) and the magically better way that CD uses if such a thing exists, though.
So now that you’ve admitted that she teaches it correctly, do I get ordained as having actually learned what the expression means?