HIDDEN Subjects in Japanese - and how to understand them | Lesson 66

Sometimes the subject of a Japanese sentence can be hard to find - until you understand the secrets. ▼Links▼
Links Referenced in the video:

Visit my Patreon community:

Red Kokeshi Angel Patrons who help this work to be possible:

Tayruh
Ann Green
Full Name
Valerie
Ted Ledbetter
Jasmine Sechrist
Jean-Marc Giffin
lateblooming
Tasty Treeko
Pamela J Leitch
Duncan Gilbey
seeinvisible
Joe Bochicchio
Bob Dobbs
RP Whitaker
Edward Nicholes Jr.
Sergio O Parreiras
Tascha Keettel
Bibo
Liane Degville
Colin Jervis
Arzar
Kathy Worley
Mirnes Selimovic

Sincere thanks to all my patrons, supporters, students and fans

▼Please visit us at KawaJapa

[alex_blue]

What surprises me are not the places where expression strategy is different between Japanese and English, but places where they are the same.

[willionaire]

oh i didnt realize this was a lesson video at first and i was like "man this is hard for me to understand" and then i saw "lesson 66" and realized i skipped 40 lessons ahead lol

[HaniIsmael-lzhf]

No one will see this but dang, I can't believe I first thought 東京オリンピック選手が食べる料理をみんなに教えてもらう meant "The Tokyo Olympic player is teaching everyone [how to make] the food that he ate"
Immediately thinking "東京オリンピック選手" was the subject and "食べる料理" ("eaten food") because of the particles they were attached to.

I don't exactly know how I got to this meaning, but this phenomenon has increased for me, always getting kind of scarily different interpretations of the real meaning (╥ ᴗ ╥).

Thanks to Dolly 先生 and immersion though, I'm getting better at it everyday, even though I have feeling like "missing out on the joke" when it happens 😅

[FlashTrance]

Ok that intro sound and voice effect had me dying. Well played.

[namb]

This also heavily happens in Spanish in the form of the "implicit subjet" (it becomes implicit since conjugations give the subjet away). It could get more extreme, for example: Se mostró a las personas presentes la comida que se dará a los jugadores olímpicos (It was shown to everyone the food that will be given to the olympic players). This sentence in Spanish has no subjet at all, it is an "impersonal sentence". The English translation is a passive sentence but in Spanish it is not passive, just impersonal.

[BabyBallascore]

I feel famous. Sensei using my question from a couple of months back in a video like this. Thankfully, heavy immersion has made this type of thing second nature to me now.

[johncameron]

This is very interesting on the modification clauses. Sometimes it is very easy to fall for が食べる to be the subject of the sentence. But as you noted it can put itself into the noun after and become a longer detailed sentence that continues onward. However I never knew that Zero が could mean something broad as "they" and the subject can be left out leaving it out of the sentence.

This was a great lesson and a necessary one.

[manuelcapela]

Once more, thank you, beautiful robot-sensei.

[gdexter]

Very clear and cleverly explained with reference to English and French.

[benjiirokagashima]

It's funny that everytime i start having crises about japanese being non logical i start watching your videos and realize it's not, and that i will someday be able to have the same mind of a japanese person when it comes to expressing ideas, for your videos and everything thank you so so much, you really deserve a whole lot more of subscribers, once i graduate from university and start working i will absolutely support you on patreon and buying stuff you make so please stay doing these amazing things until then!!ww
I have a couple questions i was hoping you could enlighten with your wisdom
In an anime im watching this sentence appeared 「いつも一緒にいるだけが友達じゃないだろう？」and the context was girls talking about how friends arent only the ones you spend all the time with, and the questions in in relation with the が/は video you made not long ago in that i dont get why its が and not は, ive been thinking around it a while and i just dont make sense out of it

Another thing is that i still dont quite grasp how では works as for why it sometimes has the は and sometimes it doesn't and how じゃない for example makes sense im not sure if youve made a video about it. Oh and also i still kinda confuse the で from sentences such as in これで作った, meaning that you did something like using something, i think it's not the same で from the video you explained it meant that everything that was before で applied for whatever theres after it, as in みんなで行こう, im not sure if youve also made a video about that kinda で

Thats it for now, and also happy new years キュアードリー先生！！

[a.m.]

Notes for myself:

Every Japanese sentence has a subject (whether we can see it or not), but sometimes that subject is undefined, just like the word they in the sentences "I hear they're putting a man on Mars next year" and "You know, they're getting everybody's opinion on what the Olympic athletes should eat"
Example
Toukyou orinpikku senshu-ga taberu ryouri-wo minna-ni oshiete morau = they're getting everybody's opinion on what the Olympic athletes should eat

[arpitkumar]

In 「東京オリンピク選手が食べる料理をみんなに教えてもらう」, I thought only 食べる was modifying 料理 meaning the "eaten food" and translated the sentence as "Tokyo Olympic players will make everyone know the food that is eaten". I mistranslated 教える a little as "inform/make known" and もらう a little as well. For this translation, I guess 知る and ～ておくwould have suited more. So I never thought the whole phrase could be modifying 料理 instead of just 食べる.

[gnashgoulash]

I have question about the way that sentence is broken down!

You did it this way:


Right?


but when reading it (of course, I'm not native, but I've studied for a long time), I was wondering if my interpretation was wildly wrong:



"The Tokyo Olympic Athletes Teach Us What They Eat"


Is that also a potential interpretation or can you definitively say that （…選手が食べる) is strictly modifying 料理?

[vroomfondel]

How did you know that 食べる was linked with 選手? I thought the sentence was broken down as:


[Tokyo Olympic Athletes] [will-eat food] [from everyone] [taught] [received].
Tokyo Olympic Athletes had everyone inform them about the food they'll eat.

Thank you for the clarification!

[yasashisagakawaii]

I have a question. When I wanna ask my friend informally "Are you 幸せな?", should I say ”幸せな?" or I should say "幸せだ?" ?
I guess, first one with な is the right one, but not really sure.

[Garbaz]

Complete tangent, but I am wondering whether one of the reasons for the English passive having become unfashionable has to do with it using a helper verb (got). In German, which I think is rather closely related to English, we have a similar phenomenon, where expressions formed with helper verbs, while grammatical, are also "unfashionable", though to very different degrees.

The first is "tun", which I think is better translated with the Japanese する than the English "do". Young children often times use it a lot, and it works in a similar way as "する-verbs" in Japanese, for example "Ich tu kochen." - 「料理する」("Ich" - pronoun, "tu" - する, "kochen" - 料理). The thing to note here, and the reason why it's used by children, is that you no longer have to conjugate the verb itself ("kochen" - cook, which stays in it's plain/noun form), but only the helper verb. But even in the most casual speech, "tun" is never used by anyone above maybe the age of ten, it simply sounds too simple and childish, probably because it is redundant, and implies that the speaker doesn't know how to conjugate verbs.
The second is "haben", which is the helper verb used to form one of the many past tenses we have. The interesting thing is that the tense formed with it is more or less exclusively used in speech and speech-substituting writing, like text messages or letters. For formal writing, a different past tense is used, which, here's where my theory comes in, is not formed with any helper verb, but rather through conjugation.
And thirdly the the German passive, which is pretty much exactly equivalent to the English passive, it's also formed with a helper verb ("werden"), and, as far as I can tell, also seems to be quite unfashionable, though I am not too sure about it, I just can't think of any sentence where it sounds good.

My second theory as to why the passive is unfashionable, is that it does not fit well with the otherwise very ego-centred ways of expression in European languages (making assumptions here, I'm sure not all European languages are the same in that regard), which you have pointed out in your videos, in contrast to Japanese.

[livinghooman]

"グッド" as always ^^. I like how you always explain why and how things are the way they are, it really is better than to just teach hiw things are.
These phrases with apparently no subject (and sometimes no subject at all, which isn't possible in Japanese) are something that my native language also has, but even then it's really tricky because they don't work exactly the same and it's hard to assimilate those things 100% even with immersion, so these videos do help a lot.

Also (off topic, but I think this might be the best place to ask this and, "as it's already written, It may as well stay"), I wanted to ask to you what is the meaning of this sentence:
繋げて考えると面白い。
(which got translated as "it's interesting to think about how everything is connected")
I know the meaning of each word, but the translation seems a little off and I don't exactly know what is going on in the structure. my first guess was that øが繋げて (the subject in the context this was in could mean both those things or everything) but I don't really get why と is used and why 考える is immediately after 繋げて。It's probably going to be something simple ~that I forgot~, so "dumb it down for my level" would be more appropriate instead of asking what it means.

Anyways, ありがとうございます!

[Eltrn]

Yes, it's definitely felt awkward sometimes in Japanese when something is perfectly acceptable in polite Japanese, that would be almost crude in English. The short single word sentences consisting of a verb and ます/です, can seem almost grunt-like if listened to when used to English. Especially when Japanese is known for having an emphasis on politeness. It slowly gets easier as my Brain stops wanting English when reading Japanese.

[something]

Hello Mrs cure, do you know any simplified Japanese dictionary in the web?

[Knight-Cyberia]

I feel strange with this video, is like if you were reading my mind or something. Some days ago I started reading a light novel and have been struggling with this kind of sentences, for me the dialogues sometimes get hard to know who is speaking, and with this kind of senteces with invisible subjects, object, etc. it's like: "what the heck is happening here?". In some way I've figured out to understant, and now with your video it will become pretty easy, thanks xD
That and I also think that several things in japanese works as spanish does, like: られる・もらう・くれる・あげる work similar to: me・te・se.
So, please stop hacking my pc. :D