（最後のカレーパンを食べるのは）私が（カレーパンが）食べたい。

“As for eating the last curry pan, it is I that has [want to eat] curry pan.”

What on earth prevents me from saying in English “As for me, it is the last curry pan that I want to eat.” ? (Okay maybe you don’t like my particular sentence — but the main thing is putting the “As for” with “me” which is definitely very possible.) Nothing. So now the analog to English is destroyed, because I have no idea why it should make a difference in Japanese.

My name is Cyrus Farivar and I’m a reporter for The World, an American public radio show (www.theworld.org), a co-production of Public Radio International, BBC, and WGBH Boston.

I’m working on a story about how language learners and teachers are using Skype to conduct interactive langauge lessons via the Internet and I’d very much like to interview you.

When would we set up a time to chat — via Skype, even?

-C

When I explained the same stuff to my confused friends, suddenly they understood and gained a better understanding of the proper usage of the particles. Even learning Korean has given me a better understanding of particles in general.

It’s incredible that I’m one of the only people in my Japanese classes who understands the material, but then I realize how it’s being taught. It’s just not a practical teaching method. Fix it and people will understand.

I understand what you’re saying and except for the harsh attitude against teaching the “ga” particle as subject agree with what you’re saying. Obviously Japanese is structured differently from European languages, but personally I’m not convinced that anything but extensive practical familiarity with these two words will yield anything but a superficial understanding of how they’re used. As long as teachers emphasize the caveat of finding correspondences between their own language and a target language, I don’t see a problem with drawing a connection between “ga” and subject marking.

（最後のカレーパンを食べるのは）私が（カレーパンが）食べたい。

“As for eating the last curry pan, it is I that has [want to eat] curry pan.”

If you look at it this way, it looks like a bunch of nested clauses:

1.”The curry pan is want to eat.”

2.”As for me, curry pan is want to eat.” (topic particle 私は changes to 私が when the outer topic subordinates it in 3.)

3.”As for eating the last curry pan, it is I that has [want to eat] curry pan.”

The topic and the curry pan are omitted from the sentence as they are understood from context, so we get 私が食べたい。

Anyway, that’s just an argument to address the ambiguity issue. :) I basically agree with your article and was just needling with the grammar as a mental exercise.

豆腐が食べたい。= Tofu is the thing that [want to eat].
私が食べたい。 = I’m the one that [want to eat].

You would only say 私が食べたい in the context of identification. For example, if there was only one curry-pan left and your mom asked the family, “Who wants to eat this last curry-pan?” Then it makes sense to use が because you’re identifying yourself as the one that wants to eat it among the other family members.

So the point of using が has nothing to do with making it a subject. In fact, there is no explicit way to say, [x] is doing the action. It’s always derived from context.

BTW, even though 食べたい is formed from a verb, isn’t it technically an い-adjective? Japanese ～たい、好きな、嫌いな seem to be adjectives that describe something that we normally use a verb for in English. In my head, I always reconciled this with the “subject particle” by turning the English verb (want, like, don’t like) into an adjective-like idea:

豆腐が白い。 The tofu is white.
豆腐が食べたい。 Tofu is want-to-eat-ish.
豆腐が嫌いだ。 Tofu is this-sucks-ish.

If you do this, Tofu does appear to be the subject of the clause, rather than the object.

I still agree that calling が the “subject particle” isn’t right though. :)

While neither は or が are used only to mark the “subject”, both can and sometimes do.

First, it’s important to define the word “subject”. Languages such as English are reliant on the subject-predicade relationship. Japanese, on the other hand, follows a topic-comment formula.

This topic-comment relation is evident in the example Tae offered:

今日は忙しい
“As for today, [I, he, she, we, they] is/are busy.”

Today is the “topic” of the sentence, what we are talking about, and what follows は is a comment on the topic.

In this respect, Japanese sentences rarely contain “subjects”.

However, if we consider a subject as the actor whose actions are being described by a verb, then the notion of a “subject” is, of course, alive in Japanese.

And Tae’s advice of not looking at Japanese through English grammar lenses is golden.