How to translate this ilk?

Things that are physically present and visible to the listener are already “introduced” in some sense by being physically present. So you could say 私は without saying something else.

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As others have said, the topic is often implied. Japanese is a highly contextual language, meaning speakers and writers say little and imply a lot–you have to do a lot of reading between the lines. Often, when you’re talking about yourself, you don’t even have to use 私は–unless you’re comparing yourself to other people or were talking about another topic immediately before.

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I believe you can remove the verb plenty of times too and still be understood.

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Heh, not sure! Now we both gotta brace for new knowledge. :man_student: :man_student:

This is something I’m still trying to grasp, but don’t always assume something like A は B です means A is B.

This is an example Cure Dolly has used. Say you’re in a restaurant and the waiter comes up to you and asks you for your order. 私はうなぎです. You’re not saying I am an eel, but its more like as for me, eel it is. So you’re basically ordering eel.

Edit: Also check this out. I really like the way the images depict the differences of は and が. Japanese Particles: the difference between wa (は) and ga (が) | nihonshock

And another lovely example… I have a bad case of Diarrhea - Japanese learning English - YouTube

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Because subject and topic are different.

Topics, as I said, are the what you are literally talking about in the conversation. In Japanese, you don’t usually use actual pronouns when referring to people or things. That’s what the topic is for. Once you bring up a topic, you don’t have to use は and that word/phrase again until you bring up a new topic of conversation.

In other words, once you say “アリスは食べる” it’s implied that everything from then on will be about Alice, so you don’t have to say “アリスは” again. I could say, “アリスは食べる。飲む。” and the second sentence would still be about Alice. But if said “アリスは食べる。 私は飲む。” that means we’ve switched to talking about me.

As for subjects, they are what we typically think of in English. It’s the noun/phrase that does something. They are marked by the が particle. The topic is often the same as the subject. But sometimes we can’t use a subject as a topic. This is if it is new information is added to the conversation. So I can’t say, “アリスは食べる” if the person I’m talking to has no idea who Alice is and she isn’t present. I would have to say “アリスが食べる” because when you introduce a new piece of information you use が to mark the subject. From then on, you can use は to mark Alice as the topic because you both know who she is now.

I hope this helps some. It might be a little confusing but は/が are two of the most confusing particles. However, they are two of the most important ones too, so I would make sure you study them both heavily.

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I wrote a comparison some time ago here:

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The way I would probably translate it for fluidity’s sake in English is “Alice will eat” or “Alice? She’ll eat” or “Alice is eating” or “Alice will be eating.” Grammatically, it’s more like, “As for Alice, [she] eats.”

Let’s say you are at a 食べ放題 and you have a group of people. You are trying to figure out who is eating, who is drinking, and who will be doing both. Alice is in the group and you are speaking up for her. You say アリスは食べる to quickly interject Alice’s preference into the discussion so there isn’t a mix-up. The subject is Alice. However, if you said アリスが食べる, it would have a connotation that sounds more like, “ALICE will eat” or “Alice alone, unlike everyone else, will be eating.”

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I’m sure this will make more sense in the future, when I have more knowledge of Japanese grammar, but it still is a little weird to me that there is no future tense and that a lot has to be implied, since I minored in college in Latin where everything is spelled out exactly how it should be said, you just have to notice what endings/conjugations/surrounding text is used.

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Technically, English doesn’t have a dedicated future conjugation either. :smile:

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I must admit I find it interesting that English speakers complain of the lack of a dedicated future tense inflection in Japanese. :slight_smile: But I find it more surprising that Japanese introductions, taught in English, never seem to mention the parallel between will and -(o)u. Both are modal auxiliaries with many meanings, including volition, probability, future… the big difference being that in English, nowadays, will is mostly about future or probability, I guess, while -(o)u is mostly volition or probability.

Anecdotally, in Sansom’s Historical Grammar, he has this to say about -(a)mu, the ancestor of -(o)u: “MU is usually described as forming a future tense, but it is more accurate to say that it denotes probability.”

If we take a step back, I like to think the languages are not as far apart as we’re sometimes told… or at least they differ in ways that are not that unfamiliar. On that topic, it’s just my opinion, but I am sceptical of the whole trend of “explaining Japanese in isolation” (usually termed “the Japanese way”). I believe there is much to be gained from comparatively studying the language, taking advantage of things you know already. Oh well…

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The biggest advantage we have as adults is that we can already take in information from speech and writing. Why would people prefer to infer things vaguely and possibly attach the wrong meaning to them instead of being told something clearly? I don’t get it. We might need background information to understand the explanation well, but it’s worth it and it’s transferrable.

Yes!!! That!! The ‘probability’ explanation of the -(o)u form honestly makes a lot more sense to most of its usages than the name ‘volitional’ does. In my opinion it’s closer in meaning to ‘would’ and ‘could’
(and even ‘should’ in certain usages) than to what English-speaking teaching sources teach (ie, pure volitional).

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Do people still try and explain Japanese in isolation? That seems pretty silly given the influence China/Chinese had, at least on the writing system. I feel like that also discounts all the indigenous languages that surely influenced the development of “standard” Japanese. I’m totally with you, I love comparing languages to see where they really differ, and it’s so cool when you find similarities in two languages you would never expect to

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No, at least not in the way you mention. I think nobody is denying that Japanese as a language has been influenced by others. But among learners, I get the impression a lot of people feel they need to study Japanese separately from English, by forgetting all about English, “because they are so dissimilar”. I think that’s a shame.

Maybe they were told that all those verb endings and suffixes are a Japanese thing, that they express many different moods and judgements. But (as we were talking about above with @konekush ) English has plenty of modal auxiliaries: can, may, might, must, will, would, should, etc.

They might think particles are a totally foreign concept: attaching weird little things to nouns to mark whether they’re subject or object? Totally unlike case marking in German or Latin!

Even the whole は/が debate isn’t that alien to us; theme and rheme, old vs new, are things that have been discussed in the context of Western languages… in fact, how do people figure we magically have this whole arsenal of vocabulary and theory about topic-comment in English?

Again, I find it both a little funny and a little sad to see someone coming to you all starry-eyed telling you about this awesome unique theory about は/が that they read or saw somewhere, how it sits at a different level than grammatical case, how it contrasts old and new… and how it’s certainly a very Japanese thing that surely requires an entirely different mindset… :slight_smile:

P.S.: All examples taken from personal experience; I won’t be naming specific resources or people or things, as that’s not the purpose. I think it’s more of a general thing…

P.S.': Also, just to be clear, for people jumping onto the conversation, I am not claiming that things are totally the same in English, just that I think it’s useful to look at the similarities and differences.

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As a linguistics doctorate student that I took Ancient Greek with said, the more languages you know the easier it is to pick a new language up. And seeing as her specialty was Classical Arabic, she did not mean the vocabulary or the alphabet, but rather the transferrable ‘this has a name and it does X in language 1 this way and in language 2 that way’ manner.

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I completely agree. As a latin minor, it was subject object verb like Japanese, and was similar in many ways, but latin could literally not leave a single word/ending/conjugation out for it to make sense (except for Virgil but he was stupid and left out things for rhetorical purposes). Learning japanese vocabulary/kanji is super easy though, just grammar is super funky in Japanese compared to English (though I am sure it is much harder to learn English “grammar” as a native Japanese speaker since we have so many exceptions to every rule.

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Ahh I see what you’re saying, and yeah I think you’re right, it could definitely be helpful to try and draw parallels to English rather than try to totally separate it from Japanese. But I can also see from a teacher’s perspective how it could be easier to teach it as a totally unique grammar point rather than try and explain how they function syntactically similarly to things in other languages. I’m not sure I could have appreciated that kind of comparison when I started learning Japanese (even though I now find it fascinating)

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The reason it’s not done this well is because it’s really hard to do it, and also that the results that come from this type of learning are only visible much later into people’s studies than just learning it rote-wise. It also requires knowing a lot not only the target language, but also about the target language, and also about the instruction language.

All of that requires much more training and schooling than just a language teaching certificate. Because most people don’t really advance past beginner/intermediate in any language, they don’t really have the need to know how the language works past learning basic grammar as rote — and then all the long hard work of teaching how the language(s) work(s) is meaningless.

That said, even I get lost sometimes in linguistic jargon even though I studied undergrad linguistics for 2 years (never finished though), and sometimes I just want the bottom line. Still, it’s nice to know that I can look up things like this if I have more time or space of mind.

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As for the car, I am washing it.

クルマは私があらいます。

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