Quote:
Originally Posted by masaegu
I am afraid that I would be the worst person to ask this question because I have never studied Japanese as a foreign language. Hope someone else can chip in here with recommendations.
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and here is where I step in! Possibly the worst Japanese student on this website and also one of the slowest learners in the world. However, how to differentiate wa and ga is slowly starting to be understood by even the likes of me by this book:
--> Making Sense of Japanese (What the Textbooks Don't Tell you) by Jay Rubin (Shout out to KyleGoetz for suggesting this in one of his threads) which I received 2 days ago. <--
Jay Rubin is a professor of Japanese Literature at Harvard University and has been teaching for over 30 years.
The book is only 130 pages or so and he devotes 18 pages to the study of Wa and Ga.
Not Convinced? Some excerpts:
"After having differentiated the named topic from implied other potential topics, wa dumps its emphatic load on what comes
after it. This makes it very different from ga, which emphasizes what comes
before it.
Have you ever stopped to think about why you were taught never to use wa after interrogative words such as dare, nani, and dore? Because ga puts the emphasis on what immediately precedes it,"
"All wa ever does is tell you, "I know not about others of this category we've been talking about, but as for this one..." Wa tells you nothing about how its topic is going to relate to the upcoming information: it only tells you that some information is coming up that will be related somehow to the topic. In fact, the only way that you can tell whether wa marks an apparent subject or object (or anything else) in a sentence is in retrospect."
"Ga marks the grammatical subject of an upcoming verb or adjective, but wa marks the topic--not the topic of a verb, but the topic of an upcoming discussion."
Go buy the book and get it over with!