Hey Guys, I am pretty new to grammar and am currently learnning the basics of the various particles. I came across following sentence:
カレーはご飯と食べるよ
At first, i was very confused why only the カレー stands before the は. I adjusted the sentence to what looked more natural to me:
ご飯とカレーは食べるよ
This way looked much cleaner to me because you have both the food items before the は. Both of those sentences gave me the same translation when i put them into https://www.romajidesu.com/translator so i was confused what the actual difference between them might be.
After thinking about it some more I came to the conclusion that the reason for the structure of the first sentence was probably that it tried to emphasize the Curry as the main dish and have the rice as a side dish, but then I remembered that は emphasizes what comes AFTER it, so shouldn’t it be the other way around then?
Im so confused and clearly im missing something so I would love to hear someone with actual knowledge on this question. Thanks a lot in advance
This is a statement about curry (curry is the topic), and it’s saying “you/I/we eat it with rice”. So we’re explaining something about curry to somebody who doesn’t know that food.
This is a statement about curry and rice (as opposed to other foods), and it says “you/I/we/they eat them”. The context that comes to mind for this sentence is that you’re a really picky eater and you’ve just said you don’t eat fish, or potatoes, or vegetables. But, you say, you do eat curry and rice.
No, eh… not quite.
は is the topic of the sentence. We’re talking about curry. Maybe we already said a bunch of stuff about curry, where you can buy it, what’s your favorite brand, etc. Now, new sentence. Speaking of curry, I eat it with rice.
Maybe none of those previous sentences occurred, but same flavor here, we’re speaking of curry, and “i eat it with rice” is the information being conveyed.
Perfect example, by the way, of how the topic and subject aren’t the same thing. In this sentence the subject isn’t specified at all, but it certainly isn’t “curry”. It’s whoever does the eating.
In that case, both of those sentences seem like very specifically contextual and not really broadly usable outside of these situations you described. In that case, if I wanted to just plainly say ‘I eat curry with rice’ without wanting to have it have a deeper meaning like comparing it to other foods or be misunderstood as such, how would I say that?
Well with the disclaimer that I’m only a N5-N4-level learner myself, I would say
（僕は）カレーとご飯を食べる。
With the topic being me. It’s a fact about me, I eat curry and rice.
If I wanted to say specifically I always eat them together, not just curry or not just rice, then… maybe I’m out of my league I’d be tempted to say カレーとごはん一緒に食べる but I’ll let the real experts set me on fire for that lol.
I think as a first run at what は is doing it’s probably good to think of two main jobs:
topic, i.e. “this is what I’m talking about, the thing we both know about”. (The rest of the sentence is then the new information you want to tell the listener about the topic, so that is naturally where the emphasis of the sentence is, but that’s kind of a secondary effect I think.)
contrast, i.e. “for this, as opposed to other things”. This turns up a lot with は in negative sentences .
Everything’s pretty contextual in any language (and Japanese more so than most) – when I interpret what you mean by a standalone English sentence like “I eat curry with rice” I imagine a context where saying that makes sense. If you mean “when I eat curry, I eat it with rice (i.e. not on its own or with salad or whatever)” as a kind of statement about your eating habits, then something like カレーをご飯と食べる I guess? (But that’s a kind of odd thing to say in any language since it’s the default…)
That is “I eat curry and rice” (it’s the “and” meaning of と, not the “do a verb together with” と).
You forgot an を after ごはん, but otherwise this is “I eat curry and rice together”.
yeah you are absolutely right, I guess i just need to more time and experience to get the hang of how the particles change/decide the context of these details, super interesting though
It seems like if the main point of the sentence was the always eating together, you could also translate that more directly, but the grammar points would be a little out of N5 range, haha
(bad attempt):
カレーを食べるときは、ご飯も食べる
something like that. (going for, whenever I eat curry, I also eat rice)
very interesting and helpful, context is hard to grasp sometimes