wakarimasen
後輩
- 29 Dec 2004
- 23
- 1
- 13
Hey,
I'm brand new here, so please forgive me if I'm asking an old or dumb question. I tried searching but didn't find anything readily available to answer my query.
I'm just starting to learn Japanese and finding it fascinating. However I am hitting one mental roadblock, and I'd very much appreciate it if someone could help me get through it.
I know "ga" is supposed to be a marker of a sentence's subject. This makes sense in most sentences I've encountered. For example, I think I understand the way this works:
Biiru ga hoshii desu.
Literally this is "Beer is desired," right?
But, here's a really simple sentence (right out of my books) which makes no sense to me:
Nihongo ga wakarimasu. - (I) understand Japanese.
But it doesn't really make sense for Nihongo to be the sentence's subject. In English that would be "Japanese understands." Really, nihongo should be the direct object, no?
One site I found just sort of explains this phenomenon away by saying "Well, some verbs just take ga instead of wo." Is there a rule or some kind of better explanation? I'd really appreciate any insight you can offer.
Thank you!!
Justin
I'm brand new here, so please forgive me if I'm asking an old or dumb question. I tried searching but didn't find anything readily available to answer my query.
I'm just starting to learn Japanese and finding it fascinating. However I am hitting one mental roadblock, and I'd very much appreciate it if someone could help me get through it.
I know "ga" is supposed to be a marker of a sentence's subject. This makes sense in most sentences I've encountered. For example, I think I understand the way this works:
Biiru ga hoshii desu.
Literally this is "Beer is desired," right?
But, here's a really simple sentence (right out of my books) which makes no sense to me:
Nihongo ga wakarimasu. - (I) understand Japanese.
But it doesn't really make sense for Nihongo to be the sentence's subject. In English that would be "Japanese understands." Really, nihongo should be the direct object, no?
One site I found just sort of explains this phenomenon away by saying "Well, some verbs just take ga instead of wo." Is there a rule or some kind of better explanation? I'd really appreciate any insight you can offer.
Thank you!!
Justin