14-Cycle Notes

Learned an interesting thing about Japanese particles today. I've mentioned before that Japanese uses particles much more freely than English does - in fact it's easier to construct a coherent sentence in Japanese without a verb than it is to do so without a particle. Particles are like prepositions in English. In fact sometimes particles are prepositions. Most of them don't translate directly into English, though, so thinking of them as prepositions can be misleading. They're their own thing, for which English has only limited parallels. Direct translation between English and Japanese can mess you up sometimes.

Which brings me to today's topic. I've frequently run across the particles o and ga. Japanese uses them because the most important rule in Japanese grammar is "the verb always comes last." Japanese does all kinds of funky things with verbs, including turning them into adjectives in various ways - but I digress. The point here is that as long as the verb comes last in a sentence the subject and object can float about pretty much as they please. "John Mary invited" and "Mary John invited" might mean the same thing in Japanese. Or not.

O and ga help to make these distinctions. I was confused by them for a while, because when I translated sentences directly they both appeared to indicate the direct object of a verb. For example, "I like sushi" would be sushi ga suki desu. "I eat sushi" would be sushi o tabemasu. "Sushi" is the direct object of the verb in both of those English sentences, but the particle is different. So for quite a while I was just taking the whole thing on faith - using o and ga as the lessons directed, without really understanding what I was doing.

Understanding came today in the form of three revelations. The first one initially left me even more confused: ga denotes the subject of a verb, not the object. My first reaction to that was "How on earth can 'sushi' be the verb subject in the sentence 'I like sushi'?" Which shows how direct translation can be misleading. Because the second revelation is that the Japanese verbs meaning "to be" (it has two of those) can also mean "to possess" or "to have." And the third revelation was that the format for expressing one's own feelings about something are to use an adjective and the verb aru in the meaning of "to have."

Now some of you may have looked back at the sentences above and said, "Wait, so desu is a form of aru?" Yes, it is. Just go with it; the how and why are too long to go into here.

So, it breaks down like this: "I eat sushi" describes an action that I take. So in Japanese I use o, the direct object particle, and say sushi o tabemasu - literally "sushi I eat." The English sentence "I like sushi" also describes an action I take, but that's not the case in Japanese. Because it's describing my feelings about something I use the adjective suki, which means (more or less) "an unspecified pleasant quality," and I state that sushi posesses this quality: sushi ga suki desu. Literally I'm saying "sushi is likable (by me)" or "sushi has (something I like)." And that's why that sentence uses ga to denote that sushi is the verb subject, not the object.

Shout out to my Japanese-speaking friends: I know that aru is the verb-form that applies to inanimate objects like sushi, whereas iru is the form that applies to people. But if I was saying "I like Mary," would I use Maari ga suki imasu since Mary is (one hopes) animate? Or does Japanese not carry the iru/aru distinction that far?

Oh, about Mary's invitation to John: "Mary invited John" can be translated into Japanese as Maari ga Jon o sasotta or Jon o Maari ga sasotta. O and ga define the object and subject clearly in that sentence, so it doesn't matter what order they come in.

Tags: japanese