Hi all, apologies as I know this is a pretty googleable answer, but I just seem to have so much trouble with understanding order in Japanese.
I’ve been trying to follow the idea of:
Subject - Object - Verb
or even
Setence Topic, Time, Location, Subject, Indirect Object, Direct Object, Verb
But the ordering just doesn’t seem to make sense for me. Maybe I just don’t understand the idea of a “topic” or “subject” ?
For example:
1 - Whose bag is this → kore wa kaban no dare desu ka.
2 - But apparently its → kore wa dare no kaban desu ka.
But I also wonder why it can’t be
3 - kono kaban wa dare no desu ka? (Not sure about the no here).
And then theres also
4 - kaban wa dare desu ka? Which I guess misses out the kore, but I don’t really see its need?
Why is kore the subject/topic here, why isn’t it dare, which makes more sense to be that the main idea/topic being “whose” is it. I also feel there are times where dare is the topic which makes me more confused.
Another example would be something like:
5 - That woman is not miss Suzuki → ano onnanohito ha suzuki san dewa arimasen
While I sort of understand it, I don’t quite get why the subject it “that woman” and not “suzuki san” I guess I feel they both feel like the subject in its own way.
Words and phrases that modify nouns come before that noun. It’s similar in English “whose bag” = the bag belonging to whom; “the red bag” = the bag that is red; except that in English, phrases that modify generally come after (e.g. “the bag that is on the chair”), while in Japanese, modifiers always come before (椅子の上にあるかばん)
That’s perfectly fine.
Well, you can use “who” as the subject (though never the topic, because the topic must be a known element) when we’re just using it as “who” - who is that person, for example. But “whose” is modifying a noun, so the noun is what we’re actually working with rather than the “who”.
For a comparison of how awkward it’d sound to use “whose” as the subject, think of the English sentence “This bag is whose?”
Well, you can say it like that - 鈴木さんはあの女の人ではありません = Suzuki-san is not that woman, but the focus is different. With “that woman” as the topic, it’s the woman’s identity that I want to know, and the sentence is eliminating Suzuki-san from the pool of possibilities. With “Suzuki-san” as the topic, I want to know Suzuki-san’s identity, and we’re eliminating that woman from the pool of possibilities.