I'm trying to understand when to use appropriate particles in a sentence, and keep up with vocab too! Please someone help.
customer: "そのぼうし[の, を, か, ね] ください"
"たけしさん [か, の, よ, or no particle] せんもんはれきしです"
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Don't translate word-for-word. Better yet, try not to translate at all, as far as is possible. Japanese word order is very different to English word order, and the functions of the words differ too - some things that are verbs in English are adjectives in Japanese, and so on. Not to mention that English doesn't have case particles, so translating into English to figure out which particle to use is a really strange idea! Trust me - understand the Japanese sentences as they are and you will save yourself huge headaches later. I'll explain this one in detail. ください can indeed mean "please". This is the reason you got tied up a little bit - the English word "please" isn't obviously any word that can take a noun at all. So how are you supposed to know which particle it's correct to attach to the noun that "please" takes, when "please" doesn't take a noun?! Of course, the answer is simply that English and Japanese are incredibly different things, and ください and "please" are incredibly different things. They just happen to be good translations of each other sometimes. Ramble aside. You should examine the Japanese - the whole reason it comes to be translated as "please" is that it is actually the imperative form of くださる, meaning "to give" (usually "to me"; hence it can also mean "do (for me)"; and it's a so-called 'humble' word, so it has polite connotations). So, your translation should start "Give me...". Is it now obvious that そのぼうし ("that hat") is the direct object of your sentence? The correct particle is を.
Takeshi-san ... specialty: history. This sentence is probably intended to mean "Takeshi-san's specialty is history". That is, the noun "Takeshi-san" is modifying "history" - we would normally think of this in English as a possessive. The Japanese particle that is going to do the job is の. As a few rules of thumb: よ and ね will usually be found at the end of a sentence, and so will か (when it's a question marker); you don't usually find two nouns next two each other without a particle joining them (though you do in long names of organisations and so on); and a noun will normally need particles like を, で, に if it is somehow an object of a verb (unless that verb is する, and except in very casual speech). But don't let any of this think you're off the hook - learn it properly, or it will plague you for as long as you're learning Japanese! |
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