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Lesson 2: Core Secrets

[Video Link]

In the previous lesson, we learned how every Japanese sentence has the same core. The main carriage and the engine; A and B. The thing we are talking about and the thing we are saying about it.

And I told you that we can have a lot more carriages as sentences become more complex, but they still always have the same core.

Now, we are going to look at some of those extra carriages. And the first one we're going to look at is a very mysterious carriage, but it's also a very very very important one.

Part of the reason that so many people find Japanese confusing, vague, and difficult is because they are never properly taught about this carriage. What does it look like?

Well, I told you before that, while every sentence has the same two core elements, you can't always see both of them. You can always see the engine, but sometimes you can't see the main carriage. Why not? When you can't see it, it's because of this.

This is the invisible carriage. And while you can't see it, it's always there. And understanding that it's always there is the key to understanding Japanese. So, what is the invisible carriage?

In English, the closest equivalent is "it". So, let's begin by seeing what "it" does in English.

Let's take these sentences: "The ball rolled down the hill. When the ball got to the bottom, the ball hit a sharp stone. The ball was punctured and all the air came out of the ball."

Now, would anybody ever say that? Of course they wouldn't, because once we have established what we are talking about, we replace it with "it". So we say, "The ball rolled down the hill. When it got to the bottom, it hit a sharp stone. It was punctured and all the air came out of it."

Now, let's suppose a small child tries to say this and says, "Ball rolled down hill, got to bottom, hit sharp stone, got punctured, all the air came out."

Is that difficult to understand? No, it isn't difficult at all, is it? Because in fact we don't need to use this "it" marker every time, over and over again. English grammar demands it, but there's no actual communicative need to do it. And Japanese doesn't do it.

"It" actually means nothing because it can mean anything. If I say "it", I may be talking about a flower or about the sky. I may be talking about a tree, or my finger, or the Eiffel Tower or the Andomeda galaxy. "It" in itself doesn't mean anything: you know what "it" is from context.

So, if a small child, or even an adult, comes down to the kitchen at night and someone sees her, she might say, "Got really hungry. Came for something to eat." Again, there's nothing confusing or difficult about this. She means, "I got really hungry. I came down for something to eat." In English this isn't a proper sentence, but in Japanese it is.

All those little pronouns, like "it", "she", "he", "I", "they", in Japanese can be replaced by the invisible carriage, the zero pronoun. But the important thing to remember is that they are still there.

All right. So let's look at this at work in Japanese. I might say, ドーリ だ, and that means "I am Dolly". So the full sentence is:

⊘ が ドーリ だ

This looks as if it only has an engine and no main carriage, but the main carriage is simply the invisible one. And we can say that "I" is the default value of the zero pronoun, the invisible carriage. However, the context can define it as anything.

For example, if we hear a rustling in the woods and look over in the direction of it, and I say, うさぎ だ. That means ⊘ が うさぎ だ! "It is a rabbit!" It, that thing we just looked toward, rustling in the trees, that's a rabbit.

土曜日 [どようび] means "Saturday", so if I say, 土曜日 だ, I'm saying "It is Saturday". What's "it"? Today - "Today is Saturday" - "It is Saturday".

All these sentences are full, complete Japanese sentences, with the が-marked subject, the A carriage, the main carriage, and the engine. In each of these cases, the main carriage is invisible - but it's still there.

Now, it may seem a little bit like splitting hairs to insist that it isn't being left out, it actually is there. But it's important to understand this. It's important at this stage, but it will become even more important as sentences become more complex. Without this piece of information, they're going to start sounding extremely vague and hard to grasp.

So now, let's start looking step-by-step at how sentences can become more complex. And then let's see how it all fits together at this stage.

I'm going to introduce you to one more kind of carriage and that is an を car. This means a noun marked by the particle を. It is sometimes said "wo" and more usually just "o". And if you know the English grammatical term "object", which means the thing we're doing something to, it's a good mnemonic to remember that "o" stands for "object".

So the を car looks like this, and as you see, it's white. It's white because it's not part of the core train. The core train always consists of just two elements, the engine and the main carriage. When we see white cars, we know that they're telling us something more about the engine or about the main carriage.

So let's take a sentence here:

私 が
ケーキ を
食べる
わたし が
たべる
I
cake
to eat

This means "I eat cake". Now, the core sentence here is "I eat". Those are the black carriage and the engine.

The white carriage, ケーキ を, is telling us more about the engine. The core sentence is "I eat" and ケーキ を is telling us what it is that I eat.

Now, the interesting thing here is that we may often see this said like this: ケーキ を 食べる. And I think you already know what's going on when this happens.

This is another case where we have the invisible A car. We can't have a sentence without a が. We can't have an action being done without a doer.

If we say ケーキ を 食べる, what we're really saying is ⊘ が ケーキ を 食べる. And the default value for "zero", for the invisible carriage, is 私.

So usually this is going to be "I eat cake", although if you were talking about someone else at the time, it might mean that that person eats cake.

All right. So this is quite a lot of information to process at one time, and once again, if you'd like to make some sentences using を and using the invisible carriage please do so. If you do that, I'd like you to write it in three forms, that's to say, the Japanese would be ケーキ を 食べる; the full form of the Japanese, including the zero pronoun, the invisible carriage, would be ⊘ が ケーキ を 食べる, and the English would be "I eat cake".