JP 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Kanji, Stroke Order, Ballpoint Pen
Document Summary
Vocabulary: (cid:2073)(cid:2112)(cid:2115)(cid:2285)(cid:2127) (cid:2074) student, yes (casual, (cid:2073) (cid:2123)(cid:2131)(cid:2074) tomorrow, no (casual, (cid:2073)(cid:2113) (cid:2074) today, (cid:2073)(cid:2123)(cid:2117) (cid:2074) exam. The first particle we will learn is the topic particle. The topic particle identifies what it is that you"re talking about, essentially the topic of your sentence. Let"s say a person says, (cid:1688)not student. (cid:1689) this is a perfectly valid sentence in japanese but it doesn"t tell us much without knowing what the person is talking about. The topic particle will allow us to express what our sentences are about. Now, while this character is normally pronounced as /ha/, it is pronounced /wa/ only when it is being used as the topic particle. Here, bob is indicating that his question is about alice. Notice that once the topic is established, alice does not have to repeat the topic to answer the question about herself. Since we have no context, we don"t have enough information to make any sense of this conversation.
