This is what I call conjugation, you modify the verb form and add an ending suffix…
Truth is that my native language heavily relies on conjugation.
I don’t want to carry on on that debate, the point I wanted to make is:
I can’t trust Cure Dolly, because I don’t know her credentials, and she makes some points that no one else is making.
And it is a pity because some of her explanations are quite good.
I hope to shed some light on the zero が mystery.
I watched this specific video, and what Cure Doll means when she says that Japanese can have a zero が is that Japanese is a Null-subject language.
Null-subject is a linguistic concept that states that, for some languages, the subject doesn’t need to be uttered in order to exist. Japanese is not alone there. Many western languages are null-subject, such as Portuguese and Spanish, for exemple.
Quoting Wikipedia, “Of the thousands of languages in the world, a considerable number are null-subject languages, from a wide diversity of unrelated language families. They include Albanian, Arabic, Basque, Berber, Bengali, Catalan/Valencian, Chinese, Estonian, Finnish, Galician, Gujarati, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian, Japanese, Korean, Maltese, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Sindhi, Slavic languages, Spanish, Tamil and the Turkic languages, as well as most languages related to these, and many others still.”
If you are familiar with Spanish, you will know that “hablo”, means (I) speak. But contrary to English that require the utterance of the subject every single time, Spanish is a null-subject language, and you can drop the subject “yo”.
That’s the zero が in Spanish. It easy to notice the existence of this “subject が” in Spanish, because even when not said, it triggers conjugation.
(yo が) hablo
(tu が) hablas
(él が) habla
In Japanese, since there’s no verb inflection (conjugation) triggered by the subject, it is a bit hard to notice its disappearance.
By the way, the same idea can be applied to Null-object languages, which Japanese is also part.
That’s why 食べる is a fully formed sentence in the same way that “como” is a fully formed sentence in Spanish. Who eats (subject が) and what is eaten (object を) are invisible but grammatically present in both languages.
All I said is simply gibberish for native speakers of Japanese or any language, for that matter. Unless you have linguistics training, you won’t know if your language allows pronoun dropping or not. You will just naturally speak it. Ask yourself in your own first language if you knew its linguistic typology 
And you don’t really have to know these things to speak languages… proof is that most people don’t know any of it, but everyone speaks at least one language.
I hope that it helps to clarify what Cure Dolls is talking about.
Well said, my fellow linguist
Most linguists would call that conjugation.
However, Japanese is mostly agglutinative. This means that generally every ending has roughly one meaning and several endings can be combined. By contrast, in a fusional language like Latin, one ending combines several functions (e.g. past and passive). Fusion of endings does happen sometimes in colloquial Japanese speech though (ている → てる).
Maybe that’s why cure dolly doesn’t want to call it “conjugation”. In the end, it’s just a label, but she is outside of mainstream usage not wanting it call it that.
or も, or any other of the more obscure of what Cure Dolly calls “non-logical particles.” A much simpler model is to say that there’s always a が and those topic-related particles do their own thing and that the が phrase can be omitted when it’s obvious. In essence, splitting every sentence into both a topic-comment structure and a subject-verb structure
We invent terminology to describe them, but ultimately, language is constructed and used through reinforcements of how people say and write things, along with some academic teaching of what is “more correct” which is still usually more concerned with simply prescribing correctness than getting into the weeds of linguistics.
I don’t know if every way Cure Dolly describes the Japanese language is entirely “true” – honestly I doubt it, but that’s in the same way that I assume every single resource to help English speakers understand Japanese is over-simplifying, telling little white lies, or speaking around something that is ultimately a monumental task to describe concretely. The way she speaks invites some special criticism; I won’t deny rolling my eyes sometimes when a video opens with loads of fluff about how other methods are bad.
But in the end, the goal is to help people understand Japanese well enough that they can start interacting with the language itself, and reportedly, she’s managed to do that quite often. So she’s right enough for what her purposes are. I think anyone deeply concerned with getting the exact facts on the language is looking to study Japanese linguistics, not just learn to read and speak it, and Cure Dolly (or Genki, or Tae Kim, or any of the other resources for learning the language) aren’t where you should go to get that level of understanding.
True. I oversimplified too much. I guess I said “は or が” because people are generally not confused as to when they should use も instead.
I don’t think your model is much simpler than mine, because in your case the explanation needs to start accounting for when subjects can be dropped and when they must be dropped (maybe I’m wrong, but I would assume that *私は私が日本人です is ungrammatical). That said, there may be other valid reasons for your analysis (e.g. syntactically).
Regardless, whichever way you look at it, people are going to be initially confused as to whether they need to use は or が in any given sentence, and the idea that the argument which is semantically identical to the subject of the clause can be encoded with either (as well as other particles) is still worth pointing out (even if you don’t consider 私は to be the subject syntactically).
Well, she repeat times and times again in her video, that what she proposes is just a model of the language but there are many other models. She also repeatedly point that a model can never map perfectly a language, and that learners after learning the structure of the language should then immerse and use the language as much as possible.
You make a good point that in my model the choice between は and が still exists as a more advanced point of what your nuance is, so it doesn’t eliminate the problem entirely. I’m pretty sure your sentence isn’t ungrammatical just as awkward as saying “As for me, I’m an American” instead of “I am an American”
Edit: and that choice is more of a problem in output but I will confidently say Cure dolly’s model is what made me able to parse sentences while reading without it feeling fuzzy
actually it does seem to be ungrammatical my bad
Well, good to hear she says it herself! In other words, that was more or less exactly what I was trying to say when I followed that. I’ve watched a video here or there but I mostly used Genki personally, so I haven’t heard that from her herself. But yeah, we’re in total agreement on that point, then.
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…
“LOL, it’s funny to me how you’re contradicting yourself and proving my point, based on my interpretation of your argument” is exactly the kind of thing you should avoid in polite discussions. It adds nothing to the discussion except heat.
Anyway, actually on topic, yeah, I don’t entirely understand some people’s focus on ‘credentials’ particularly the ‘do they have videos of them speaking fluent Japanese with native speakers’, sort. For a video with the purpose of explaining a grammar point, the credential that really matters is whether you understand the grammar point at the end of the video better or not.
I have little doubt that she’s a fluent speaker, but even if not, the ability to speak the language and ability to teach the language’s grammar don’t necessarily correlate. I learned a lot about grammar from my Latin professor in college[1], despite the shocking revelation that they can’t speak a lick of Latin and in fact have never even met a native speaker.
Personally, if it were me, I’d turn the clickbait-y-ness down in the titles of the videos, which sometimes feel like “JAPANESE textbooks DESTROYED with GRAMMAR and MODELS”
… but I don’t find that she’s terribly overselling. (If clickbait titles is what it takes to appease the algorithm and keep the lights on, I guess more power to her) Her models for the grammar do both seem to be accurate and simpler for many people than the more common versions you’ll find in grammar text books.
Are they perfect? Of course not, but as they say “All models are wrong, but some models are useful”.
[1] Actually, it was Κοινή Greek, a different dead language
I’m not sure whether 「私は私が日本人です」is ungrammatical or just awkward to the point of sounding ungrammatical. But if that’s bad, then 「私も私が日本人です」is even worse. This is why when Cure Dolly says "every sentence has a が”, I interpret it as “every sentence has a subject” (even when it isn’t explicit, or marked by a が).
This is wack
Do you know of any sources that teach the “Japanese way” in English? I, for one, have gotten tripped up more than once by the way some English grammatical terms get attached to Japanese systems where the concepts are similar. For example, “transitive” and “intransitive” verbs don’t really map to the way English grammar uses those terms. As another example, your comments on the “て form” just immediately clicked as “Oh, yeah, of course that’s what’s really going on” when I read it.
When I’ve run into articles that go into the way Japanese grammar is taught to natives, it’s generally made more sense to me and been revelatory. I’d love to find a source that uses the Japanese vocabulary of grammatical terms and breaks it down in a similar way.
I realize there are things that’d still be lost in the translations, if only because I don’t have n formative years speaking the language. I still think I’d find a lot of value from such a thing.
Sadly, my Japanese isn’t good enough to use native materials at this point, so I’m reduced to looking for materials that operate in this fashion in English. So if you know of any that hew closer to this ideal, please share? Thanks!
I think this is a classic example of confusing the model with reality…in many ways whether there actually is or is not a hidden が in the sentence is completely irrelevant, especially in the context of language learning. the main thing is whether it’s a simpler description of the language.
I personally think zero subject/object do lead to a simpler to understand model. saying there’s always an invisible が is probably wrong, but I can understand it as a simplification for learners so that they don’t get overwhelmed from the start.
it’s not necessarily simpler overall, but it’s simpler at the start, which counts for a lot when you’re learning a new language. it doesn’t help with distinguishing whether to use the は or が, but the idea is helpful for getting people used to the idea of not having the subject mentioned, and imo, explicitly teaching that the thing marked as は is not the subject makes things much easier down the line when you start getting to grips with its uses.
it’s not exactly teaching, and it’s only about verbs, but this page has a lot of info
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Japanese_verbs
@clarkejduggan don’t worry too much about whether the textbook is 100% correct when you’re trying to learn the basics. at that level, they all have to teach things that are wrong because the way we use language is too messy. even if they teach you something that’s technically wrong, they’re rarely so bad that you won’t self correct by listening/reading native content. it’s more important to find what clicks with you (I’m not saying blindly trust everything, just that the most popular options are close enough to the truth when you’re starting out).
Cure Dolly has a number of things that aren’t quite correct, but I think it’s a useful source for getting a feel for japanese grammar if you can stomach her videos.
Even English sometimes omits the subject when the verb is imperative (i.e. a command). In the sentence, “Put away the dishes,” the subject is understood to be “you” but it is not spoken aloud (unless the speaker is trying to be rude or peremptory).
And you are right that native speakers are not always the best source of grammatical information because they are often oblivious to it even when they speak their language correctly.
I agree with you generally. The map is not the territory and a model that is useful for teaching isn’t necessarily the same model that is useful for linguistic analysis (cf. the fact that we still teach that atoms have electron “shells” in schools even though that model is wrong, strictly speaking) or one that agrees with the psychological reality of how language actually works in peoples’ minds.
explicitly teaching that the thing marked as は is not the subject makes things much easier
That does make some sense.
Though note that I wasn’t advocating teaching that は is or can be a subject marker (I know at least one person who seems to have been taught that). I would argue that a subject can have は if it’s the topic, but that doesn’t make は itself a subject marker.
Even worse is when Genki teaches that in 私は日本語が好きです the subject is 私. That’s wrong in every sense of the way if you look at it through Japanese eyes, and it only makes sense in the context of a literal translation from English. Even to a German, Italian or Spanish speaker that seems weird, as the fact that the “thing to be liked” is the subject is completely natural to these languages (“mir gefällt Japanisch”, “me gusta el japonés”). That said, even such a flawed model seems to get people conversational, and maybe it can in a sense be more helpful than a more accurate one, at least in the initial stages.
(Also, btw I don’t object to the term “zero subject”, that’s a pretty established term.)
yeah I didn’t mean to imply you were
but I disagree with this, and I think this really comes down to the difference between the two models and why I prefer the zero subject and は is never attached to the (syntactic) subject model.
if I’m understanding you correctly, your model says that これはペンです has a subject (これ）that happens to also be marked as a topic. The other way of thinking about it is that これ is the topic and only the topic. there’s no subject mentioned in the sentence, but we know what it is implicitly because we know the topic. I think this decoupling works better because the thing marked with は can be the topic, or the subject, or the object (and that’s before we even get into all the subtleties). it’s just far more consistent with how it’s used.
I think sometimes the way she describes things can seem convoluted, but one of her videos I watched today brings up the ‘illusion of understanding’, and shattering that seems to be what motivates all of her videos.
While it’s nearly impossible to completely separate an English thinking mind from English speaking concepts when studying a foreign language, it’s not necessarily beneficial to force a foreign language into the English framework just to make it ‘make sense’ in case by case scenarios. At that point, you might be under the impression that you understand that “私はXが好きです” means that “I like X,” when that’s not really what they’re saying. That in turn affects your understanding of what は and が and even 好き are functioning as in that sentence. She’s trying to adjust thinking into something closer to the way a Japanese mind may function, although she states herself that teaching Japanese in English is always going to be flawed, but you can adjust how those flaws influence future understanding of the language.
I don’t think this works for everyone, but as someone who is pretty good with understanding English grammar concepts, it’s helped me quite a bit in forming Japanese style sentences in English as literally as possible.
Yes.
I have some sympathy for that view and, for all I know, it might end up being more accurate. I don’t even know what linguists working on Japanese (native or not) would say about it, and in the end it seems to me like both “models” can be made to work equally well.
That said, you still end up with the fact that a topic in a sentence can be referentially identical to its subject, which I guess is what confuses most people, so it’s worth pointing that out.
(edit: also I guess the reason why I don’t sweat the “something that is marked with は can be the subject” reasoning is because for me, “subject” is solely a grammatical relation. Even if the word order and other things are totally different depending on whether something is a topic or a non-topic subject, that still doesn’t change the arguments’ relation to the verb. In that sense, the distinction of whether there is “no overt subject, but the hidden subject is identical to the topic” or “there is an overt subject and it happens to be a topic and is therefore treated exactly like any other topic” is purely technical and impossible to tell apart “in practice”)