Sorry for the interruption.
This is my first topic, so I’m very sorry if I have placed it in the wrong category or made a mistake.
I was wondering what particle I should be using in this sentence instead of particle で,
チューターは漢字で私を沢山てつだいました。
(It’s meant to mean: My tutor helped me a lot with kanji.)
I know the particle で itself means ‘with’, e.g. I wrote with a pencil. But in this case it’s not exactly ‘with’ kanji, otherwise it would sound more like ‘My tutor helped me a lot with the use of Kanji’ and I’m not trying to say this. I’m not too sure what the particle should be (or if I have the sentence completely wrong and I need to re-structure it), so any help would be appreciated.
For context, I’ve been tasked to write a 100 worded document in Japanese and this idea came to mind, but I wasn’t too sure on how to execute it perfectly.
Once again, this is my first ever topic so I’m sorry if I’ve made any mistakes and thank you for being a great community to me so far on my Japanese journey.
The particle you want is を, though I’m not sure I’d stick を directly on 漢字. 漢字の勉強を perhaps. Either way, the kanji is the direct object in this sentence - it’s the thing that’s having the verb done to it.
You, as the beneficiary of the verb being done, are the indirect object, which is marked by に. However, it’s kinda weird, grammatically speaking, to have the speaker be the indirect object (it indicates that you empathise more with your tutor than you do with yourself), so you’d probably use an auxiliary verb like 手伝ってくれました - my tutor helped with my kanji as a favour to me - and leave the 私 out altogether (as it’s strongly implied by the くれました). This might be a higher level of grammar than you’re currently at, though, so probably sticking with 私に might be best.
But yeah, don’t get too hung up on “this particle means this” - it’s more that particles indicate the function a word plays in a sentence. The で in えんぴつで indicates the means by which the verb is done - i.e. “write by means of a pencil”, or in smoother English, “write with a pencil”, but it’s not quite so straightforwards as “で means with”
Your で is probably the best possible thing you could have come up with for your sentence and will be comprehensible. For a more natural sentence, I’d suggest something like
Thank you so much, you have no idea how greatly appreciated this is (in reality I wasn’t expecting this good of an answer). The clarification you made is great and I’ll make sure to use the ideas you gathered. ありがとうございます。
No you’re fine, くれる would also work if you shifted the sentence around and I just went with what I would personally say. I think I just had an aversion to using くれる because I wouldn’t be comfortable with picking は or が due to a lack of context. Or maybe I just use もらう more, idk