Trying to use more complicated sentences, need particle help

Japanese Language Grammar
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…and possibly more than just particle help if I blundered elsewhere.

先日食べたマーボードフ好きだった
I liked the mappodofu I ate the other day. (If I structured it right.)

So, the way I understand it, 先日 doesn’t need a particle after it. マーボードフ might need a が, I’m assuming no を is needed here. I don’t know if leaving out the particle is alright there, and whether or not it conveys any particular attitude. And because the 食べた is past-tense, I don’t know if I need 好きだった (if I even got the way to apply an adjective to the past right)

And I’m also trying to get a handle on verbs-as-nouns. I’m wondering how modifiers work on them, and what particles I would use if this is the correct structure:
カオパット？食べ？好き
I like to eat khao phat.
? for particles I have no idea for.

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Someone else may know better but here’s what I think!

You do need the が in your first sentence - 先日食べたマーボードフ が 好きだった That’s because 好き always uses が to mark its subject. (I have seen it omitted in songs/very informal speech but I believe that’s grammatically incorrect. You don’t need anything else, as 先日 doesn’t need a particle.

I personally would say 好きだ not 好きだった。I very rarely see 好き in the past tense. I think it might imply you liked the food you ate yesterday but now don’t? You want the present tense because you still like the food (which you ate yesterday)

For your last question I would say:
カオパット を 食べるのが 好き
Use the を because たべる always takes を to mark the object, and that’s still true even in a phrase like this.

To make a verbal noun you put it in the simple form and then you can add either の or こと. The difference between the two is very subtle - A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar says の is more common for concrete actions/phrases and こと for abstract. Sometimes they’re interchangeable. Finally, now it is a noun, you add が to show it relates to 好き。

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Just a spelling thing, tofu is とうふ, so you would have to do マーボードーフ

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When it comes to food you ate I think it would be more natural to say 美味おいしかった.

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It was something I was also curious about and after researching it a bit I think it’s fine to use 好きだった. On the contrary it’d sound awkward to say 先日食べたマーボードフ好きだ because you’re recalling about a specific meal you had in the past and it doesn’t exist now. In a general case (“I like mapo tofo”) you’d of course say マーボードフが好きだ

As some Japanese sources explained “past tense” is a concept a concept from English. In Japanese they call it タ形 and it can have different nuances.

With 好き specifically if you use the ta-form it doesn’t automatically mean you don’t like it any more.

To illustrate the usage, I’ll use a technique my Japanese tutor taught me: searching for the word/phrase you want to see example usage of on Twitter :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

https://twitter.com/x__xpunch/status/1435566684597723140?s=20

私この時の投票用紙がなんか好きだった

This is clearly the “liked” nuance (i.e. thought they looked pretty cool after checking them out), not that they’ve become a fan of these paper forms…

Another one which seems to be a more common nuance:
https://twitter.com/hokuhokucho_y/status/1435463759313522688?s=20

実はこのシーンが一番好きだったから
使われててめちゃ嬉しい！

This is using ta-form because this talks about a completed action. I don’t know the full context but probably someone was making a video that the current twitter user participated in creating and they liked a particular scene. Now the video is out, so it’s not possible to change whether the scene appears in the video or not, therefore they used ta-form (このシーンが一番好きだった).

If they wrote before the video was complete they could’ve written it as:

実はこのシーンが一番好きだから、使われたらめちゃ嬉しい。

https://twitter.com/akihira_nyuseki/status/1435240377569533956?s=20
This one is very similar to the OPs sentence.

昨日のキャスで1番好きだった麿

(note: I think キャス refers to a stream on ツイキャス, online live streaming platform, and 麿 is probably slang for the マシュマロ, a Q&A platform).

好き is in the past tense because it refers to the past event (昨日のキャス), not because yesterday they liked that question but they don’t like it today. Maybe it helps to think of it as they liked that at the time when it was relevant and now they don’t think about it.

Update:
I asked my tutor about it and she said it feels a bit unnatural to use 好きだった in this specific case:

She said that most natives speakers would use 良い or おいしい, often with 思った

先日食べたマーボードーフがいいと思った。
先日食べたマーボードーフがおいしいと思った。
Or
先日食べたマーボードーフがよかった。
先日食べたマーボードーフがおいしかった。

Using 好き in this instance feels more like a direct translation from English she said.

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Wow, thanks for that thorough explanation.

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