jib71

No grammar nerd is going to correct you, Joe. But you need to be a grammar nerd to make sense of the advice that "ga" always denotes a subject. Unfortunately, that's not the situation that applies in the context of someone who wants to learn a little Japanese.
Never a word more truly spoken. (And when I say never, I mean that there may, in fact, have been some occasions).

gnaget

GA is a tricky business. But I would like to correct ABMJ regarding object market. O is the standard object market as in XXXXX-O kudasai. Give me XXXX.

Joe is correct that GA is by definition a subject marker while WA often refers to the subject it is by definition the topic marker.

But there is also an exception that you use GA in place of O (where O is the object marker) in expressing need or desire. Like XXXXX-GA irimasu. But Osora is making the point that you would use WA if you don't need something. But then shouldn't it be XXXX-O iranai desu? I guess I am still confused on that issue.

gnaget

I would say Nihongo-O wakarimasen. Or Nihongo-O wakaranaidesu. If you use GA then you are emphasizing relative to something else. Like if the conversation was about different languages. (Or does someone else have a sense of the implication of GA vs. O in this sentence?)

Generally you would omit watashi-wa in this sentence when it is clear.

joejones

Then you are speaking broken Japanese. Wakaru doesn't take objects with "o." The correct way to say it is "nihongo ga wakarimasu."

You could say "nihongo o rikai suru" though. Correct grammar though it is not a common expression.

joejones

Like wakaru/wakarimasu, iru/irimasu is an intransitive verb but native English speakers conceptualize it as being equivalent to a transitive verb in English, and that is the source of the confusion.

Think of "wakaru" as actually meaning "is understood" (thus, nihongo ga wakaru = Japanese is understood [to me]) and "iru" as actually meaning "is needed" (biiru ga iru = beer is needed [for me]).

joejones

This whole thread should illustrate that learning Japanese is fraught with danger.

gnaget

I never claimed to even speak broken Japanese.

Ok, you reminded me of something important re GA vs. O regarding transitive vs. intransitive verbs, but I never put it into a big picture context. I didn't realize that wakaru is intransitive. I also just learned how to use iru (and aru) without it being explained that it is intransitive. I guess that's a big pitfall for non-native Japanese because we extrapolate how the verb is in our other language. I speak two other European languages fluently so it really slaps you in the face how different it is to learn Japanese.

Otherwise, classic examples are hajime vs. hajimaru or shime vs. shimaru where there are different variants for transitive vs. intransitive. Here I was taught the transitive vs. intransitive issue.

So it's doa-ga shimarimasu as the lady says in the elevator or on the subway. Here it is obvious from an English speaker's perspective.
And then John-wa doa-o shimemashita.

But to illustrate another point, it could be John-ga doa-o shimemashita. If you want to make a point that it was John and not someone else. Correct?

joejones

Basically. I recall reading a book by Jay Rubin (the Harvard prof best known for translating many of Haruki Murakami's novels into English) where he said one way to differentiate "wa" and "ga" is to remember how they are used in questions. You always say "nani ga...," etc. when asking to identify an unknown subject, but you say "kore wa...," etc. when asking something about a known subject. So when you say "John-ga doa-o shimemashita" it is as if you are answering the question "who closed the door?" When you say "John-wa doa-o shimemashita" it is as if you are answering the question "what did John close?"

ksandness

Yes, that's the explanation.

Furthermore, if your version of "I don't understand Japanese" is Nihongo GA wakarimasen, you're either announcing the fact or answering the question "What language don't you understand?' If you say Nihongo wa wakarimasen, you're answering someone's question about whether you speak Japanese.

Those little particles are the bane of foreign learners, just as the proper use of "a" and "the" stymies Japanese people learning English. There are entire workbooks on wa and ga written for the benefit of foreign students at Japanese universities.

SeriouslyLost

Oh come on: Japanese has three, count them, three irregular verbs. OP asked about survival/travel Jpns: You do not need to screw around with anything beyond a plain form and, if you're anal about it, a polite form for word endings. Someone looking for a simple '20 survival phrases in Japanese' doesn't even need to know that much: simple plain form will get by.

Most of you are making Japanese out to be some sort of mystery language. It isn't. Speaking survival Japanese is dead simple. It doesn't help, for example, to have people say "Japanese doesn't have consonants or vowels" when that is plainly wrong. It does. It just, like most languages, doesn't represent them alphabetically.

On the positive side, a lot of the posts did make me laugh.

SeriouslyLost

Unless you live in the north of Japan where 'ga' is often substituted for 'wa' anyway. Being 1.8+ metres, blond, and blue eyed and coming out with fluent Tsugaru-ben certainly causes raised eyebrows in Tokyo & anywhere south.

Pickles

Fair enough. It does have aiueo, and n (but in that order!). The point I really wanted to make is that you don't pronounce them like you would in English, but "flat", as you would in Spanish. Everything else is vowel-consonant pairs.

gnaget

There are two irregular verbs: suru and kuru. Are you including aru because the negative is just nai? I guess the ara part was dropped at some point in history.

It's not that simple just because there are only two (or three) irregulars. The conjugation is quite complicated.

It's different if you learn by immersion.

I would advise against using plain form if you are only addressing stranger.

p.s. There is no reason to learn to speak in honorific or humble (except using kudasai) form. Polite is adequate. But tourists (and local expats) will be exposed to service industry people that speak like this on a daily basis. So it becomes helpful to comprehend it.

joejones

Agreed that as a visitor, you should be learning polite form and not plain form. This is how people would generally speak to you (unless they are patronizing you like a small child) and it is how you would generally be expected to speak to them. Plain form is for use among family or friends, or by bosses or particularly rude customers.

You will hear the honorific and humble forms a lot as they are always used by customer service people. When speaking to a customer you are supposed to use honorific verbs to refer to anything that their side does and humble verbs to refer to anything that your side does. This extends to things like PA announcements -- you will hear the word "moshiagemasu" a lot, which is the humble verb of "say" and literally means something like "speak upward" as if the speaker is physically below their audience. This area of the language is tricky enough that many Japanese people get it wrong, particularly younger types, so as a beginner the best you can hope for is to catch some of the nuances here and there. As a customer you would only have to use polite form, and you could get away with plain form if you didn't mind ruffling some feathers here and there.

Most phrasebooks I have seen only show polite form, and when I learned Japanese in school we did everything in polite form for a few months until we were ready to "graduate" to plain form, and eventually to honorific and humble form (though pedagogical methods elsewhere may differ).

freecia

Polite or not, I tend to get by as an occasional tourist in Japan with snatches of Japanese sentences. I probably sound like a not particularly bright person who has the vocabulary of a toddler. Thanks for the pointers to move me up to a slightly more intelligent sounding toddler

All this talk reminded me that I tend avoid Japanese Starbucks shops where international tourists don't tend to frequent. Figuring out how to order various Starbucks drinks with Japanese English (+ pidginized Italian) pronunciation could also do with an explanation here. I mean, I usually just drink "hot-o tea" but if I had to order something other than cak-e/keiki or something else I can point at, I'd be holding up the line and quite amusing for the locals, I'm sure.

http://edition.tefl.net/articles/hom...ation-changes/