It seems you may have misunderstood the date of the makeup lesson today. If you’d like, it might be better to schedule it for a later time. Let’s discuss it again.
Next time, we’ll have a hiragana check, so please make sure to memorize them.
こんにちは。kon'nichiwa。 In today’s lesson, we practiced self-introductions Ⅱ and favorite things. Next week, we’ll continue favorite things.
① hajime mashite。 ② watashi wa Honda desu。 ③ nihon jin desu。 ④ sensei desu。 ⑤ on'na desu。 ⑥ yoroshiku onegai shimasu。
(watashi wa) sushi ga suki desu。
The question you asked in class was really insightful—I thought it was a great perspective. Grammatical particles like *wa* (は) and *ga* (が) don’t just act as “glue” connecting words; they also help us understand the structure of a sentence. As you may already know, written Japanese doesn’t use spaces between words like English does, so we often rely on these particles to figure out where one unit ends and another begins. In addition to *wa* and *ga*, there are other particles such as *kara* (から, indicating a starting point or time), *made* (まで, indicating an end point or time), and *no* (の, showing possession or affiliation). Among them, the distinction between *wa* and *ga* is probably the most challenging. That’s why your question was both excellent and quite a difficult one. The two explanations we discussed in class—*wa* for known information vs. *ga* for new information, and *wa* for exclusive vs. *ga* for emphasis—are relatively easy-to-understand situations. There are more ways to think about their usage, but we’ll explore those gradually as we come across new examples. In fact, this is still a topic that linguists in Japan continue to study and try to define clearly, so it would be hard to cover every situation here (and we’d definitely run out of space!).
