Well that’s the problem right there. It does not.
If I said 「私はdoncrです」then the subject is me but there’s no が in that sentence. There is, however, still a subject.
Oh, I’m not a fan of him at all, quite the contrary. Just used him as an example because I assume he is quite known.
I’d liken your sentence to English such as:
“Dogs are very dependent. As for cats, they’re independent.”
Odd wording aside, in the latter sentence, the subject isn’t “cats”, the subject is “they’re”. The subject is not explicit, it’s implied.
Likewise, in 「私はdoncrです」, I would say that the subject is not explicity, it is implied. If the subject were added in so that it is explicitly stated, what particle would mark it?
11 Likes
The “they” in your example are the cats.
Since you are contrasting the cats and the dogs, the appropriate particle is は。
Correct. But the word “they” does not always mean “cats”. In this sentence it does. Thus, it’s implied. In Japanese, an implied subject is not spoken.
Agreed.
8 Likes
I don’t know what point you’re trying to make.
My piece earlier was that using が as a synonym for “subject” leads to problems.
As an English as a foreign language teacher, I’d like to echo this. It’s the same for English. Some of the ways I teach my students English wouldn’t make sense to a native speaker, but it makes sense to my students. People think about language very differently depending on what their native language is. It doesn’t make these ways of thinking “wrong.” It’s just different and whatever works for you is great.
15 Likes
I don’t think this is an accurate representation of her position nor what she tries to convey. More accurate is: “Trying to force Japanese into a European-language (or other quite-different-language) structure in order to ‘help’ people learn Japanese – like almost all the textbooks do – is wrong. The ‘right’ way is to learn/teach Japanese is to treat Japanese as Japanese, a distinct language in its own right, and to try to learn that rather than the Frankenstein’s monster of what’s taught in most textbooks.”
So, for example, she teaches that (paraphrasing, not exact quote): “There are no verb conjugations in Japanese; that’s a European-language concept. Instead, Japanese uses (among other things) auxiliary/helper verbs which are attached to a few different stem forms of the main verbs. And indeed this is how Japanese natives are taught in their school system.”
On the other hand, she also says that (again, paraphrasing): “Trying to learn kanji the same way Japanese students are taught (which is not how most textbooks teach, AFAIK, but is a semi-popular idea among Japanese-learning-enthusiasts) is not a good way to learn kanji. That’s because by the time Japanese students are learning kanji, they are already fluent in spoken Japanese, and so for them the challenge is just learning which kanji go with which words they already know. Whereas with a foreign learner, they are learning the meanings at the same time.” (I’m pretty sure this is very close to WaniKani’s perspective also; and in truth I may be mixing the two perspectives together somewhat. However, I’m pretty confident (from watching a good chunk of her videos, though not all) that Cure Dolly would mostly/fully agree with this idea.
So, she’s not at all dogmatically ‘The way Japanese people learn is the right way’. Not at all. She has critiques of the Japanese system itself, as well! What she’s trying to say when she makes this point is that Japanese is different enough from European languages that it’s much better to learn it ‘fresh’, so to speak, not trying to force a round peg into a square hole (or vice versa) by imposing European language structures/concepts onto the Japanese language, to make it ‘fit’ how European languages are structured/taught/learned.
It’s possible (I’d even say probable, to be totally honest 
) that you may have jumped to some conclusions about her content. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but to then use those mistaken conclusions as a basis to make a critique is a form of Straw Man fallacy, IMHO.
26 Likes
Thanks a lot for the links, I should begin to look at native content and not only english content.
My point was that I trust 100% most of the Japanese ressource I use, but I can’t trust Cure Dolly.
I don’t know if we gives tricks that she invented or if it is a real grammar point.
I put the two examples above to illustrate that. I found later that “で” was actually the copula te-form. So it confirmed that she was right
But Japanese verbs do conjugate. If you agree that conjugation, as well as 活用 means to modify the ending of a verb to give it a slightly different meaning (tense). So there is no reason to say they don’t conjugate. It can be a trick that helps some people to inderstand better, but her statement is, at least, misleading.
1 Like
Some people may say that the only thing that’s modified is the last character of the verb (changing the vowel sound to a different letter from the same column on the hiragana chart), and that the tense (for example) is attached to the verb. Thus, it’s the attachment giving the meaning, not the verb. In this view, one may say it is not conjugation. (Just for example.)
That’s Cure Dolly’s view, which I share. But for me, that’s what works for me. For others, simply thinking “conjugation” and calling it a day works.
Personally, I was never taught “conjugation” (using that term) in school. I picked up the term watching an episode of the cartoon Animaniacs… So you can see how I’d be predisposed to using an explanation that doesn’t use the term!
7 Likes
It’s my impression that her videos are almost entirely scripted, not word-for-word, but if she’s going to be presenting something it will most likely be prepared ahead of time.
However, she has mentioned in at least one video (can’t recall which, unfort.) that she had stayed in Japan with a Japanese family for some time (don’t know how much) and lived there ‘immersed’, so to speak. Whether that was an academic exchange/immersion program or not, I don’t know. How long, I don’t know.
And she admits her form of speaking is an odd mix of several different languages and cultures and that she doesn’t really sound ‘normal’ in any language, even her own (I think; could be wrong on this last bit), which I don’t think is actually English. She did learn English from an early age, though, and was taught a ‘form’ of ‘received pronunciation’ or ‘Queen’s English’, which, again, she doesn’t follow exactly either, but it at least explains her ‘accent’ (such as it is).
So, pronouncing konnichiha in an unusual way is actually ‘par for the course’ for her.
5 Likes
I’m confused which part you’re confused about. が does mark the subject. In your example sentence, は marks the topic of the sentence. The subject is implied because the topic and the subject are the same, hence the invisible が.
Your sentence could be more literally translated as: As for me, [I am] doncr OR As for me, [my name is] doncr. The subjects of those two sentences are different, and we actually don’t know which you intended because the が marking the subject was omitted. Since this is Japanese, that’s fine. We know what you meant.
12 Likes
LOL. You just made Cure Dolly’s point right there. When you say 「私はdoncrです」, There are NO SUBJECT in that sentence. The subject is omitted (invisible) but perfectly understood from the context since there is a TOPIC marked by the particule は From your comment above, I thought your understood that the subject is often invisible (omitted).
Think of this sentence (A common joke among Japanese learners): "Watashi wa unagi desu” does NOT mean “I am an eel” …
4 Likes
Only kidding! Even in that image, it doesn’t mean “I am an eel.”
(Minor debate tip: I recommend avoiding starting a reply with “LOL”. It can seem a bit standoffish, even if unintended.)
8 Likes
The ha doesn’t mark the subject, it marks the topic. There is both a subject and a topic in that sentence. They just happen to refer to the same thing, namely you (or I, if I were to have said it). In other words, while the subject is not explicitly stated, it is there ‘by default’, and in the context, the default defaults to ‘the speaker’, aka 私. But if the subject is not explicitly stated, then so too can the subject marker not be explicitly stated.
Consider this alternative sentence, 「私は ハンドル がdoncrです」. In this one, the subject is explicitly stated, and it differs from the topic. “As for me (you), handle (username) is doncr.” This shows that ha is a different marker than ga, what we’re calling ‘topic’ vs. ‘subject’. After all, you (the speaker of the sentence) aren’t really the five-character string of letters ‘doncr’, that’s just your handle, right?
10 Likes
Indeed.
There is a subject (invisible) in that sentence. That’s my entire point.
2 Likes
The nice thing about the Rubin model is that it helps people to think more in terms of “は vs no は” (because the が is always there, even if it’s just implied) instead of “は vs が”… I think the latter is the source of a tremendous amount of confusion.
EDIT: And I think it’s good for any language learner to spend some time on HelloTalk, reading the explanations that native English speakers give to Japanese people. That’ll cure you of any idea that natives that aren’t teachers or linguists are a reliable source.
12 Likes
Hence the ‘ga’ is ‘invisible’ too, which is my/our entire point. Looks like we’re actually on the same page! Yay! We agree! 
1 Like
If you follow the conversation you’ll should understand that I am making fun of the fact they are contradicting their own logic and making my point at the same time. It was kinda funny, in that context…
I have a MA in linguistics and if I learned one thing it’s that rarely will any two linguists fully agree on how best to describe languages.
We can’t really look into people’s heads (even though by now we can do quite fascinating neurolinguistic experiments) and even if we could I doubt we would see labels such as “subject” and “object” there. Linguistic terms are made up by humans in order to try to systematise how people speak. That’s why there can be multiple models of how languages work. Usually some of them are almost or totally wrong, because they just don’t agree with the data, but even with the better ones, you can find multiple competing explanations, and every explanation leaves room for some gaps (i.e. weird quirks of the language).
I can only say that, in the tradition of linguistics that I’ve been most exposed to, positing “hidden” or “underlying” structures (such as: there must be a が in every sentence even if it “hidden”) is seen very skeptically because it’s basically an untestable proposition. That said, if it works for somebody who is learning: great.
The common view on how verbs work is that every verb has a “valency”, a set of slots that may be occupied by different noun phrases (called arguments), and that relate to the verb in particular ways (such as: subject, direct object, etc.). How these slots are distinguished is different in every language: sometimes it’s word order (English), sometimes it’s endings (Latin), sometimes it’s particles (Japanese).
Most verbs will tend to have similar sorts of valency patterns, that’s why we group them into “transitive verbs”, “intransitive verbs” etc. That in turn gives rise to roles such as “subject”. In languages that have a subject (some languages don’t have that, but Japanese does), a subject can be very roughly defined as:
- either the single argument of an intransitive verb, or
- the more “agent-like” argument of a transitive verb
This definition relies purely on the relationship of the argument to the verb and does not make reference to how this is actually encoded.
One can argue that every verb in Japanese has a subject, in the sense that every verb has a slot that can be occupied by a subject. It doesn’t mean that a subject always has to be present in the sentence. In English, that’s almost universally the case (barring imperatives and very colloquial expressions), but since Japanese is so context-heavy almost everything that is implied can be left out. This doesn’t change the fact that the verb itself allows for the subject slot to be filled.
When we look at how subjects are actually encoded in Japanese, we see that this is either は or が. Now at this stage, I’m not far along enough in Japanese to have a solid knowledge on how this works, but from what I’ve been reading, I would tend to describe it as follows:
- は is the topic marker. it can attach to basically anything to make it a topic, no matter how it relates to the verb. がは and をは are ungrammatical, they both get replaced by just は, but には, では etc. are perfectly fine
- が is a subject marker. It marks subjects, unless the subject is a topic.
Of course it’s more subtle than that and there may be exceptions but that’s how I understand it to work so far.
29 Likes