We use Marugoto, which I find terrible. We can download grammar explanations and they are in my native language German but they are just bad translations from a Spanish text and not really helpful.
What you write makes sense, the grammar they teach is always very restricted and they don’t show you all the stuff you can do with it.
I think it’s great to have a native speaker as a teacher and I like that her bad German forces the students to use Japanese. On the other hand it can be a bit frustrating sometimes because I would like to learn more about the grammar and its rules …
I need your help again.
Yesterday in class we talked about how to eat certain dishes and came across 漬ける, to dip.
The Marugoto textbook teaches phrases like 刺身にしょう油を漬ける, to dip sashimi in soysauce. I was confused because I thought 漬ける is a transitive verb and therefore I would add を to the thing I dip into something else. But all examples were like the one I gave you, the audio examples too and the Japanese teacher explained it like that too.
Because of my confusion I checked the grammar and all the examples I could find online worked the other way around. Is there something special about 漬ける I don’t get?
The thing that you actually dip takes を, because it’s what the verb is done to. The thing that you dip into takes に, because it’s affected by the verb being done. As in English “dip the sashimi into the soy sauce”, the use of “into” is a good sign that に is the particle that’s going to be used.
Thanks! Sorry, I guess I made a mistake. They write everything in hiragana, so they probably meant „to put soysauce on the sashimi“, right? This book is so confusing because they give „to dip/put (sauce)“ as a definiton for „つけます“.
Then perhaps they meant different つける？ 漬ける is to dip into, but there’s also general 付ける which could be stretched to include “to put (sauce) on”?
So, when using 漬ける it should be as @Belthazar says - 刺身 を しょう油 に 漬ける, but your first sentence would theoretically work with 付ける - 刺身にしょう油を付ける - if it indeed was written enitrely in kana.
Native speaker are not always the best teachers, because their understanding of their native language is intuitive. They often haven’t formally studied grammar (enough), which makes it difficult to understand, let alone explain why particles go a certain way in a certain sentence.
Why go to expensive classes if all she can do is read from a book? Talking to native speakers is free, just visit Italki.
Because presumably this person received certification in teaching the kind of thing you were saying most natives can’t explain? You’d expect them to be able to explain it anyway.
I don’t know if you are familiar with Marugoto but it’s split up in two sections, katsudo and rikai. There are two courses every week, one for each section. The Japanese teacher teaches katsudo and the German one rikai.
To be honest, I think you are correct when you get the impression that these teachers are not that good. They just stick to the books and struggle with questions that go beyond. Unfortunately the Japanese teacher speaks just a bit German and it’s hard for us beginners to communicate with her.
I probably won’t visit another of these courses after finishing this one. It’s time to leave the hiragana hell of Marugoto behind me …
Hey guys, I’m very new to japanese and im learning the difference between wa and ga and how to use them, I created this sentence. ルーファスは牛肉が食べだった
Rufus is my cat, the sentence is trying to have this meaning: Rufus ate beef.
My logic when creating this sentence was to identify Rufus as the topic with は and 牛肉 as the subject or i should say object in an english sense. Did i use these correctly and does the above sentence mean, ‘Rufus ate beef’?
ルーファスは牛肉を食べた。should be correct. 牛肉 is the direct object and therefore needs the particle を.
Because there is no が in your sentence now, I doubt that it’s helpful when learning about は and が. Maybe you should form sentences where you describe the physical appearance of people or speak about what certain people like.
Could I ask what your concepts of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are? In English, at least, they’re far from interchangeable. In some other languages (like French), they can mean almost the same thing in certain contexts, but as grammatical terms, they’re very different.
Also, if you want a sentence with a similar structure that might help with differentiating the two particles, uh… how about ルーファスは腹が白い? Idiomatically it translates as ‘Rufus has a white belly’, but it’s closer to ‘As for/regarding Rufus, belly is white’. ‘Rufus’ is the topic, and ‘belly’ is the subject/thing described by ‘white’.
Both は and が have multiple uses and it’s possible for either one to be used in a sentence like this.
ルーファスは牛肉を食べた (Topic Marker は - Rufus is the established topic of conversation and you mention what he ate)
ルーファスは牛肉を食べた (Contrastive は - Rufus, not some other cat, ate beef)
ルーファスが牛肉を食べた (Exhaustive が - Rufus, and Rufus alone, ate beef)
ルーファスが牛肉を食べた (Neutral が - Rufus ate beef and this is just a neutral observation not part of any running dialog)
ルーファスが牛肉を食べた (Newly discovered information が - Rufus ate beef, and there’s some reason you weren’t expecting this… maybe the beef wasn’t for him? Or you were waiting to see if he would, because he usually doesn’t eat it if given)
My point here is not to overwhelm you… though I do understand that this might happen… but to just say that you shouldn’t worry about mastering は vs. が right away. Just absorb what you can and understand that it can’t be summed up in any simple rules, because there are numerous possible nuances that can be expressed by these two particles.
I figured I wouldn’t go into all the details because it might be confusing for someone without experience (which is why I gave such a lackadaisical example), but it seems you managed to do list the cases quite succinctly. Just one matter though:
My understanding is that what you describe as the implication of ‘constrastive は’ – ‘not some other cat’ – actually falls under the function of ‘exhaustive が’ (which I personally call ‘exclusive が’, because it excludes other possibilities). My thoughts are based on what I read in an article about the difference between は and が, which I read a while after starting Japanese in order to get a better idea of how I should use them. What I read led me to conclude that the corresponding meanings are:
ルーファスは牛肉を食べた (Contrastive は - Rufus ate beef, while some other cat, animal or person ate something else)
ルーファスが牛肉を食べた (Exclusive が - Rufus, Rufus alone, and not some other cat, ate beef)
The article I referred to is this one from ARC Academy. The relevant section is this one:
(4) The approach for using them appropriately based on whether the nominative case expresses a comparative meaning or an exclusive meaning.
Appropriate use based on the [following] standard: when the nominative case has a comparative meaning of ‘to be ~ when speaking comparatively’ with regard to nouns of the same type that do not appear in the sentence concerned, は is used (comparative/contrastive は); whereas when it has an exclusive meaning of ‘that alone is ~’, が is used (exclusive が/が for an overall description).
・I like dogs, but I hate cats. (expresses a comparative meaning)
・I am the person in charge. (indicating that among those present here, it is not the others, but I alone who is the person in charge)
That’s how I understand this particular difference in usage: が identifies and isolates a particular person or thing responsible for an action, whereas は implies that there’s someone or something else involved and that a comparison is being made.
Holy crap man, im using a tutorial that mainly describes は as a topic marker and がas a subject marker, and your explanation is consistent and makes a lot of sense with that. I see now that は is indicating the overall topic, and is therefore used in those cases, while が more directly refers to the subject of this current sentence, and therefore can be used to mean those other things!
