J-Talk

The famously impossible distinction between Wa and Ga explained. OK, you’ll still make mistakes but you’ll make fewer with this guide!
First off one of the major reasons that English speakers of Japanese make so many mistakes with this is that they approach the Japanese from the wrong way. When learners speak Japanese, many people tend to start off with the English subject, and then panic because they can’t decide whether they should use wa or ga. Take a sentence like
‘Tanaka went to Tokyo yesterday’.

Immediately, many learners go
‘Takaka … wa?ga? ….
and then the confusion arises.

This is the wrong approach. First ask yourself,
What is the Topic of this conversation? Are we talking about Tanaka, or about Tokyo or about yesterday? Or even about a Tanaka-going-to-Tokyo.

At this point simply throw out the Topic followed by wa, and then make your comment about that Topic. i.e.
Topic wa, comment.

So we could have,
‘Tanaka: [he] went to Tokyo.’
‘Yesterday: Tanaka went to Tokyo.’
‘Tokyo: Tanaka went.’
‘Tanaka going to Tokyo: it was yesterday.’

i.e.
Tanaka wa, kinou Tokyo ni itta.
Kinou wa, Tanaka ga Tokyo ni itta.
Tokyo (ni) wa, Tanaka ga kinou itta.
Tanaka ga Tokyo ni itta no wa, Kinou desu.

Having established what the Topic is, we should ask ourselves a second question. Do I actually need to state it, is it already clear through the context? If so, we can simply drop it – noting that although every sentence has a Topic it’s not always explicitly stated. So the above may become:

(Tanaka wa) kinou Tokyo ni itta.
Tanaka ga Tokyo ni itta.
Tanaka ga kinou itta.
Kinou desu.

So we can see that we use ga to mark something that is the subject of the sentence but not the Topic. In fact it doesn’t really make sense to ask the question ‘wa’ or ‘ga’ because such a question suggests that the Topic is somehow associated with the subject. This is simply not the case. We could equally ask the question ‘wa’ or ‘o’; ‘wa’ or ‘ni (wa)’ etc. etc. And that’s the point, the Topic can be anything you choose no matter the grammatical relationship with the verb.

‘Coffee, drink it everyday.’
(Kohii wa,) mainichi nomu yo.

Clearly also there can be two or more topics as the above example shows.
‘Taking about me and coffee, (I) drink it everyday.’

So If we are telling a story we might have this:
‘I went to a bar yesterday. was a nice place. Bought a beer. Really love (the stuff). (To the bar), my friend walked in, sat down, and ordered a whiskey. Apologised for being late. Then my girlfriend arrived. work had just finished. My friend ordered some food.’


Note how the sense is completely clear although we are regularly dropping words.

1.(watashi wa) kinou baa ni itta. I went to a bar.
2. ii tokoro da. [The bar] was a good place.
3. biiru o tanonda. [I] ordered a beer.
4. biiru wa daisuki desu. [I] love beer
5. tomodachi ga kite, Friend came in
6. suwatte, uisukii o tanonda. sat, ordered a whiskey.
7. osoku natte gomen nasai to iita. Being late, [he] apologised
8. gaarufurendo ga haitte kita. My girlfriend walked in.
9. shigoto ga owatta tokoro datta. [As for her] Job had just finished.
10. tomodachi wa tabemono o tanonda. My friend ordered food.

As we analyze the above passage we notice that the speaker makes assumptions about what the listener understands.
In sentence 1, he starts off as himself as the topic which as is usual in Japanese can be dropped. In sentence 2, the bar becomes the topic. In sentence 4, he explicitly states beer because otherwise there would be confusion as to whether he is talking about the bar or the beer. In sentence 5, he mentions his friend walks in. Now the topic here is ‘this situation/this bar’ which obviously he doesn’t need to state. The friend cannot be the topic because he is a completely new element to the story – in other words the topic must be part of the listener’s register either because the entity has already been mentioned or because of the listener’s knowledge of the situation (more about this later). Then we have a similar situation with the girlfriend walking in. In sentence 9, she is the topic and we say ‘job just finished’ as a comment about her. Then in sentence 10, we switch back to my friend as the topic. We have to explicitly state him because otherwise it is impossible to tell who did the ordering.

A common question is what can be a topic. Essentially, the answer is anything that is part of the listener’s register. This could be because someone has just been mentioned or because it is part of the listener’s common sense knowledge about a situation. So for example, if we are talking about a car, then the engine and wheels can be a topic because we all know that cars have an engine.

Does this mean that once a person has been mentioned that if she is mentioned again then she must be ‘wa’ rather than ‘ga’? In a word, ‘no’. We can demonstrate this with an example. Suppose 3 people are part of the listener’s register, watashi, Tanaka, and Ishikawa. What would be the difference between
1. Tanaka wa, tokyo ni ikimashita.
2. Tanaga ga tokyo ni ikimashita.

Well in sentence 1, we are simply making a statement about Tanaka. Namely, he went to Tokyo. In other words, I’m talking about Tanaka, not anyone else and there was a ‘going-to-Tokyo’. So we cannot make any inference about whether Ishikawa or myself went because I’m not talking about them.
Now in sentence 2, we need to think about what is the topic here, and it is probably something like ‘regarding the three of us’, or ‘this situation’. And then we have, Regarding this situation, Tanaka went to Tokyo. Or, ‘It was Tanaka who went’.

[to be continued]

Why do Japanese people say things like
‘I was stolen my wallet’. Learn how the Japanese passive is fundamentally different from the passive in English in this brief overview.
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In English, we make statements like
My wallet was stolen.
Toyotas are made in Japan.

In English conversation, these kinds of statement are very common when the active subject is unknown, and especially when the active subject is unimportant. The above statements can be rephrased as
Someone stole my wallet.
They make Toyotas in Japan.

This happens in English because the language has a subject requirement, and so when we don’t want to state the normal subject we flip the object into the subject place and make the sentence a passive.
Someone stole my wallet —> My wallet was stolen.

Most passives in Japanese don’t really work like this because Japanese not having the ’subject requirement’ doesn’t have such a need for the passive construction. In fact, the passive was hardly ever used in the English sense until English books started being translated into Japanese a century ago. The much more common use of the Passive in Japanese is called the ‘Affected Passive’ and it’s much easier to look at how this is literally translated into English rather than trying to relate it to the passive as we use it.

Let’s look at these two sentences:
My brother ate my cake (that I baked for him)
My brother went and ate my cake (and I was angry)

The latter sentence in Japanese would be a passive because I was (adversely) affected by the action, and we can convert it into Japanese if we do a rather literal translation in English:

I was (adversely) affected: by my brother ate/eating the cake.
Watashi wa, ototo ni keeki o tabe-rare-ta.

And that’s it really. The agent of the action is marked by ni, the verb is converted into a passive, and the ‘affected person’ becomes the subject/topic.

[h3]More Examples[/h3]Example 1
My wallet was stolen.
It’s tempting to thing that in Japanese this would be
*Watashi no saifu wa, nusumareta.
but this would be wrong. Using the above analysis, we see this is
I was (adversely) affected by someone stole/stealing my wallet.
Watashi wa, saifu o nusumareta.

Example 2
My father died.
Watashi wa, chichi ni shinareta.
Notice that in this example that there is no English passive equivalent whatsoever, but we can still literally interpret this as ‘I was affected by my father died/dying.’

[h3]Notes[/h3]Often the implication of this pattern is adversative. In other words, the subject/topic of the sentence is suffering as a result of the event.
Watashi wa, tomodachi ni osoku koraremashita
‘I suffered by my friend [came] late’.


However, if the object of verb and the subject of the passive equivalent would be the same person there isn’t necessarily an implication of suffering. These tend to be the patterns that are equivalent to English:
‘Someone called me‘ —> ‘I was called.’ yobaremashita.
‘Someone invited me‘ —> ‘I was invited.’

However, it is important to still note that I am affected by being called or invited, and the result may or may not be adversative.

In other words, it is important not to use the English passive as a trigger for using the passive in Japanese. Often there are more appropriate Japanese patterns:
‘I was bought a present’
*Watashi wa, puresento o kawaremashita
Use this instead:
puresento o katte moraimasita.

‘This painting was painted by Picasso’
kono e wa, picasso ga kakimashita.
Lit. ‘In reference to this painting, Picasso painted [it].’


Endnotes
Revision 1
Starred sentences refer to grammatically incorrect utterances. English sentences are left unstarred where a literal translation is being used for explanation purposes.