mezbup wrote:

I'm exaggerating a little here but the linguistics side of things just really doesn't matter.

I disagree.  All good explanations of grammar, even ones that have been simplified a lot for learners, are ultimately based on linguistic analysis.

There's no real need to be able to define Japanese particles in English. They sorta mean something but not really it's what they come to make the sentence mean as a whole that's important. For that all you need to know is how to use it.

But how do you know how to use it without explanations?  I'm always extremely suspicious of non-native speakers who can't explain grammar but say they know how to use it, especially with very fundamental and often used things like は and が (I'm not saying that you should be able to give a linguistic explanation of 100% of uses, but if you can't even explain the basics of how the particles work, I think there's a good chance you're misusing them in at least some cases.)

I think that for most people (myself included), with a topic as complicated and as different from English as は and が is, it's very unlikely that you will be able to figure out the usage correctly just from seeing it used in sentences.  On the flip side, just reading English explanations will not enable you to understand it either.  Both are needed.

EDIT: I mentioned this in another thread, One of my primary reasons for saying this is the extremely humbling experience of having to teach the grammar from Japanese: The Spoken Language and go through their explanations, and realize how spotty my grammatical understanding actually wa.  There were so many things that I thought I had figured out just from experience, when it turned out that I either had incomplete or in some cases totally wrong understandings of the grammar.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2009 October 21, 3:45 pm)

yudantaiteki wrote:

mezbup wrote:

I'm exaggerating a little here but the linguistics side of things just really doesn't matter.

I disagree.  All good explanations of grammar, even ones that have been simplified a lot for learners, are ultimately based on linguistic analysis.

There's no real need to be able to define Japanese particles in English. They sorta mean something but not really it's what they come to make the sentence mean as a whole that's important. For that all you need to know is how to use it.

But how do you know how to use it without explanations?  I'm always extremely suspicious of non-native speakers who can't explain grammar but say they know how to use it, especially with very fundamental and often used things like は and が (I'm not saying that you should be able to give a linguistic explanation of 100% of uses, but if you can't even explain the basics of how the particles work, I think there's a good chance you're misusing them in at least some cases.)

I think that for most people (myself included), with a topic as complicated and as different from English as は and が is, it's very unlikely that you will be able to figure out the usage correctly just from seeing it used in sentences.  On the flip side, just reading English explanations will not enable you to understand it either.  Both are needed.

EDIT: I mentioned this in another thread, One of my primary reasons for saying this is the extremely humbling experience of having to teach the grammar from Japanese: The Spoken Language and go through their explanations, and realize how spotty my grammatical understanding actually wa.  There were so many things that I thought I had figured out just from experience, when it turned out that I either had incomplete or in some cases totally wrong understandings of the grammar.

I do agree both are needed. Although no matter how many times I read about に and tried to understand it's uses/meaning it just wasn't happening so I've let it sink in and yeah I could give a vague description but definitely not 100% accurate linguistically list all it's uses and what not. But I think that's good enough if you can sum something up to it's most basic level like a native english speaker who's never studied grammar, if you gave them a sentence and asked them what each word is doing they'd be able to explain the grammar bits what they mean with a basic definition that shows an understanding. I don't know how long it's been since I read definitions of は and　が probably 10 or so months but right now I'm paying really close attention to how they're used and it's slowly starting to sink in and make sense.

As a side note, the recent post of seeing は as a : I've found quite useful in certain situations where as an English speaker you just wouldn't think it would be used but it is.

Anyway, definitions are useful, being able to define things yourself right down to every last detail isn't as useful. Definitions help I won't debate that but it does also take time for it to really sink in.

@mezbup:

I think deep linguistic knowledge is important & necessary, but I don't think that is how one should learn the basics of language in the first place. It is something one should come back to once they have a decent grasp of the language, to get them to that next level. I feel the same about classical Japanese. To really understand where Japanese is now you have to understand where it was. It's too bad I don't have more time to study it because it's incredibly fascinating digging through it and finding out where stuff came from and how stuff we take for granted like "~nai, ha, ga, etc" at one point didn't exist as concepts in and of themselves. You can also impress the weird girls majoring in Japanese who are in love with Genji and Basho by reading it in the original. I somewhat envy 油断大敵 since he gets to study etymology of kanji as a graduate student (iirc). I'd love to do a masters on Japanese historical linguistics, but I'd rather start making money

Getting back on track, most English Japanese learning material dumbs down grammar far too much, to the point of making it HARDER to learn (conjugation is a good example). The problem is that there are no beginner level textbooks meant for SERIOUS students, and a teacher can't teach a class out of reference material without doing a LOT of work by themselves. Also, most non-textbook Japanese books are meant for someone even less serious than a student - someone with a casual interest.

Last edited by Jarvik7 (2009 October 21, 4:42 pm)

Ha/ga is of course taught in every introductory course. The problem is that it is rarely taught well.

That list is an example of being poorly taught. It is presented as an exhaustive list of the meanings of ga/ha, but it's just a random collection of examples with no particular organization and no explanation (2-3 words is not an explanation).

Last edited by Jarvik7 (2009 October 21, 5:06 pm)

derr, my classical must be somewhat cobbwebby if I forgot about むかしをとこありけり, especially since I did a grammatical analysis of 伊勢物語 on a classical final

Yudantaiteki's view of null particles is a new approach.

It's not that new; it's largely based on JSL's explanation, which was published in 1987. 

So there may not be a null particle, but rather meaning given by word order.

The object can also be linked to the verb directly.  Offhand I don't know any examples where *both* subject and object are linked to the verb directly with no particles, but I wouldn't be surprised if they exist.

The role of が in classical Japanese is somewhat debated, but its role in subject-marking is extremely limited, if it exists at all.  Even if you accepted some uses of が as subject-marking, the null particle uses in Heian Japanese are significantly more common than が.

As for the bear example, this is how I understand the possible meanings:
熊食べる?  Do you eat bear? OR Does the bear eat? (no special emphasis)
熊は食べる？Do you eat bear (contrast/topic) OR Does the bear eat (contrast/topic)?
熊を食べる？ Is bear the thing that you eat? (emphasis on kuma)
熊が食べる？Is the bear the one who eats? (emphasis on kuma)
(of course all of these can mean "Will..." future tense instead of habitual)
But it's really hard to talk about these things without specific contexts for each one, and in some cases the differences may be so slight that they're not apparent (particularly between the null and が/を)

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2009 October 21, 6:30 pm)

Whew, finally read every post in this thread. I am now fluent in Classical Japanese.

ruiner wrote:

Whew, finally read every post in this thread. I am now fluent in Classical Japanese.

Seriously!? I didn't even know there was a second page until after I posted.

I think the easiest way to learn が/は is to read a barrage of short conversation in which each is used. Finding the barrage is a hard one.

How about instead of several topics on the subject of ga/ha there is just one stickied thread (or link to a wiki) with endless example conversations (corrected by some of the more experienced people and/or provided by natives themselves).

Last edited by ropsta (2009 October 21, 8:17 pm)

bennyb wrote:

I don't ever plan to formally study classical Japanese, but it's fascinating to look at the language in an older form and observe the differences. Sort of like an appreciation for books written 200 years ago in the English language.... or even Shakespeare (although that's arguably an even greater leap from the modern English language)

All I can say is that I am so glad we do not speak Early Modern English

は and が are still a hot topic in Japanese linguistics. So I think it'd be better to pick your favorite explanation that you think works well and forget about it as soon as possible. Every grammar rule available at this moment is wrong. Some are less wrong, I know. But it doesn't matter if you ask me.

As for dropping particles, it's really a tough question. For example, you can easily guess what are left out in these examples:

太郎、どこ行った？ (は would be the most logical one.),
学校行ったよ (Native speakers would say it's に.),
雨、降ってきたよ (Probably が),
あ、洗濯物しまわなくちゃ (Putting を after 洗濯物 doesn't change the meaning).

Certainly the nuances are slightly different because the rhythm is different. But the difference in meaning/nuance is not as big as these examples:

はさみ、ある？
この店、おいしいんだ
ぼく、さびしいな

You can't add は, が or any other particle in these sentences without changing their meanings. So the null particle thing isn't that simple. If you're interested, these examples are from here.

One thing you might be interested in is that Japanese people with congenital hearing impairment are also having trouble understanding the difference between は and が. They switch around は and が like non-native speakers who learned Japanese from reading books. The "books" I'm talking about includes every sort of book: not only dictionaries and grammars.

The implication of this isn't clear. It could be that humans need sounds to learn some aspects of a natural language, that grammar rules about は and が in textbooks are too crappy to be useful, or something else. But if you're learning Japanese through reading, it doesn't bode well; you're doing the exact same thing as deaf people who find は and が confusing.

yudantaiteki wrote:

my PhD topic is the Tale of Genji

Awesome. It's the greatest light novel in the world, isn't it? I know several Japanese girls who love the Tale of Genji. They even visited the tomb of the author. They're also the kind of people who play eroge, read nerdy manga, and draw doujin. Who would have imagined the first light novel ever written in the world would still be used as a template of moe stories in light novels, manga, anime, visual novels, eroges, etc in 21 century? The female author sure is the inventor of moe, tsundere, yandere, loli, shota, yaoi, rape fetish and many other things in the Japanese subculture. She did it more than 1,000 years ago in extremely high quality to the extent that her work is considered to be the magnum opus in the history of Japanese novel. It's just awesome.

Last edited by magamo (2009 October 21, 11:41 pm)

[edit: i didn't see Ice cream had already responded. Also, I should have written "inadequate (relative to other simplified explanations)" instead of "incomplete". None are complete.]

nadiatims,  I agree that it's important to have a basic understanding of the role of Topic and Subject and of sentence structure, but it's not enough. As I mentioned in that earlier thread, it's not that your explanation is incorrect, it's just [incomplete].
For example:

*It doesn't help answer the question whether to use は　or が　when the Topic = Subject. It doesn't always help us interpret the significance when one is used rather than the other.
*Substituting the term "Agent" to avoid any confusion between "Topic" and "Subject" isn't ideal. It's likely to give the wrong impression that a Subject always has agency or ability to act. So a sentence like あの女の子は髪の毛が長い might confuse some learners. If you need to add the explanation that adjectives can be like verbs, etc., then we might as well just stick with a reminder that "Subject" is a grammar term and isn't used in the general sense of sentence subject matter. Or perhaps choose a different term altogether and refer to predicate rather than verb?
*Your explanation doesn't touch on any of the related uses of が and は, such as contrastive.

I think a combination of exposure and a *gradually* more refined understanding is required.

Magamo's example of hearing impaired folks having trouble with certain particles is interesting. It reminded me of a small study comparing the spoken Japanese of two groups of university students who had studied for 4 years - one group had studied in Japan for one year and the other hadn't. There were a handful of notable differences between the 2 groups. One difference that surprised me was that the Japan group, despite a year of listening and speaking, were less able to use particles correctly than the group who stayed home with their books. The book only learning group spoke more haltingly, but made fewer particle errors. (The other differences related to mixing of politeness, appropriate conjunctions, vocab range, and difficulty of grammar patterns)

Last edited by Thora (2009 October 25, 2:31 pm)

IceCream wrote:

This might be a little picky, but if you look at the sentence:
誰が来た
there's no way 誰 can be an agent, so it's making が into は.

First of all, this isn't a complete sentence, rather its a fragment of a sentence. 誰が来た？ or 誰が来たの？ or 誰が来たか分からないよ or such would all be valid. 誰 is an interrogative and it takes the same place as a subject/agent in a sentence, so I don't really understand what your point is here. I see interrogatives(疑問詞) as like 'variable agents' anyway. So saying 誰が来た？ is like saying "person X came." and the other person understands this as a request for the identity of the variable agent. It's the same in english.
"I went to school." (agent=I)
"Who went to school." (agent=who=variable and therefore the sentence is interptited as a question. Note: the question mark and change of tone are really just emphasis.)

IceCream wrote:

その上写真写りはひどい or その上写真写りがひどい
本は好き？ or 本が好き？
which should i use, according to your rule?

I'll use the book example as it's quicker to explain. In isolation, both are grammatically correct.
"本が好き？"= "book(s) like?" = "do you like books?"
"本は好き？"= "books, like?"
which could be read "as for books, do you like them?"= "how about books?" as in the following dialogue:
A:漫画が好き？  manga like (is)? = do u like manga?
B:別に             not really.
A:本は(好き)？  books,(like (is))? = how about books, (do u like them)?
B:大嫌い。       I hate them.

This reminds me of a question I was asked by a colleague. She asked me:
does "これは絵美に書かれた手紙です。" equal "This is a letter written by Emi." or
"This is the letter written by Emi."

In isolation both are grammatically correct. Using a/the is dependant on context, and logic (not grammar) tells you which to use. Half the debate about は／が involves examples in which either would be grammatically correct.

Thora: in sentences like あの女の子は髪の毛が長い, I believe there is an omitted but implied word です which I think of as equivalent to is/am/are (the "be動詞") in english. So it's like "that girl, hair long is."
I'm not trying to argue by the way, but I'm kind of dumbfounded why people find this so difficult. Think of it this way, mentally retarded japanese 4 year olds probably have no problem with は/が, so there can't be such complex rules behind this stuff.

the hearing impaired thing doesn't surprise me. は／が are pretty similar sounds and the mouth movement is pretty similar. I occasionally teach hearing impaired students and depending on what frequency range different consonants occupy, they have trouble hearing/distinguishing the sounds.

*edit: kanji selection mistake

Last edited by nadiatims (2009 October 22, 7:42 am)