Four day weekend! Particles.

At some point homework might be a good idea... or not? I guess it went with the "not" because it's Monday now and I should probably do this thing--I will not be (too) behind on Vocabulary blogs again! Hopefully. So someone I know named Josh is back from japan now and it looks like I could learn the language from him as well so that is cool. I still haven't seen him yet but it's been more than eight years, I can handle another week or so. Hmmm, it sure it Monday, I just spent three minutes thinking about writing this sentence. I feel like I'm straining myself by even existing outside of my house right now.

Okay so particles are like the base and structure of the Japanese language--they hold it all together much like an adhesive--and also indicate what the meaning of words they are between or are by. In these basics they will be just that, basics, but as we get further into the Japanese language particles will become more specific and much more complicated, or so I've been told. If I did understand them I would explain but because I don't know them I have to go by what other people say and write. Particles also work in a case by case sense, where they can mean one thing here and another there. Again, bear with me, we are learning this at the same time--I am seriously looking this up for this blog entry as we speak--but luckily we have already used some and this may come as more of a review than an entirely new concept.

Wa and Ga
Both wa and ga idicate subjects by coming after them but we can break it down further in a loose sense. Wa is a topic marker and ga a subject marker. This gets strange because, at times, the topic is the same as the subject because the topic can be anything the speaker wants to talk about like a grammatical element, object or location. In English this can be roughly associated with "Speaking of," or "As for,"

Examples:
Watashi wa gakusei desu.  I am a student. (As for me, I am a student.)
Hana wa kirei desu. As for flowers, (they) are pretty. (They is not said outright but sometimes wa can mean ga.)
Hana wa Snape-san ni agemashita. I gave Snape the flowers. (As for the flowers, I gave them to Snape.) Here the unstated topic it "I" and refers to the objects "flowers" directly.
Nihongo wa omoshiroi desu. Japanese is interesting. (Speaking of Japanese, it is interesting.)