So I’m gonna preface my sentence today, I write my daily sentence assuming I know the grammar but am happy to be corrected, this is how you learn. Today’s is a bit weirder because I don’t think I know the grammar at all but are going to make a huge guess and maybe someone corrects me. LETSA GO.supermario.jpeg.
犬がかわいい。パンの犬はかわいい。
So tonight is the が/は trouble. I can’t ever pretend I know how it works, but here’s my thinking:
I want to say dogs are cute, no specific dog, they’re all cute so I use が. If I instead used は, that would be me saying a specific dog is cute and from context with the rest of the conversation, it would be obvious which dog I meant.
My second sentence is specifically referencing Korone, so I’ve said in general dogs are cute, but also bread dog is definitely cute!
For what it’s worth, I agree with this reasoning. However, if you put those 2 sentences back-to-back, they sound a little strange. If you said 犬がかわいい。特に/例えばパンの犬。 I think that would be more telling.
As I said in another thread, I’m going to stop anki and instead actually read things. I’m going to start a diary this week for reading the Pokemon Special manga
Somebody who has a better command of Japanese than me can probably give a better answer to that, but my understanding was that は vs. が has more to do with information and not with definiteness.
If you say 犬は好きです, you’re basically saying “if we’re talking about dogs, I like them”. While dogs as a whole are not specific, everyone knows what dogs are, so there’s no need to introduce them in a conversation beforehand, you can just make them a topic, if you want to.
Of course, you can also say 犬が好きです. In that context, the topic is the implicit subject, so if you’re trying to talk about yourself (or some other person) that likes dogs that would he more natural.
And of course if someone asks you what you like, you should use が in your answer, as in that case, the particle serves to highlight (focus) 犬.
But 好き is a bit of a special case anyway, as this is a construction that has two が arguments, one of them being a “が object” (at least that’s a common analysis of it). I think it’s generally more common to have subjects as topics and since 犬 is the object, there might be a preference to having it marked with が.
It would be different if you said something like 犬が走る vs. 犬は走る, where 犬 is the subject.