Pattern

GEP English fest was today. The impromptu skit went smoother than I expected. Lots of lame, lame, lame jokes. The treasure hunt was a nightmare though. We had these pieces of paper that the groups were supposed to copy down infomation from, but some groups took them down or hid them to sabotage the others… We had to run around the school to repaste everything after the first game. I think I covered more distance today than during yesterday’s cross country. x_x

I didn’t stay for the movies in the afternoon and went for Japanese class instead. The teacher FINALLY returned us our test papers. Turns out that two out of the three half-mark mistakes I thought I had made are actually correct… w00t! But I made another one-mark mistake so my total ends up the same. D’oh.

Today’s lesson was yet another example of MOELC’s brilliant teaching tactics at work. We learnt noun modifications today. (we actually learnt this before… but they like to create “new” grammar structures out of slightest difference in usage)

So anyway, we learnt how to add a fricking verb to the front of a fricking noun to modify it. And we took half the lesson to “learn” it. Well, that’s pretty standard for MOELC, but the bone I want to pick with today’s lesson is not that, but rather this…

母はケーキを作りました。
haha wa CAKE wo tsukurimashita.
My mother made a cake.

母が作ったケーキはおいしかったです。
haha ga tsukutta CAKE wa oishikatta desu.
The cake my mother made was delicious.

So… naturally someone asked why is “wa” changed to “ga” in the second sentence. Guess what our teacher said? “It’s best not to have two wa’s in a sentence”, then promptly went into “ignore” mode and skipped the question. Errmm… no. Having two wa’s in the sentence is not the problem here. The problem is, MOELC has never actually explained the difference between “wa” and “ga”. And apparently all the teachers are doing their best to avoid answering the question.

Basically, “wa” marks the topic of a sentence while “ga” marks the subject. There is no such thing as topic in the English sentence structure, so teachers are unable to put forth this idea without causing catastrophic pandemonium. Instead, they just make the students remember ALL the situations where you should use “ga” instead of “wa” and vice versa.

Here’s the REAL explanation: clicky.

When you first learn Japanese, you learn really simple patterns like “A wa B desu,” which means “A is B” (examples include “The hat is red” and “I am a doctor”). You learn that wa marks the noun that precedes it as the “topic” of the sentence. But really, that doesn’t make much sense at first glance. What does it mean, the “topic” of the sentence? Is it just the subject of the sentence?
Not quite. Because later you learn that ga marks the subject of the sentence.