JLPT N4 Grammar が and は question. Answer is が. My answer is は. 母親 first appears in this sentence, so I thought the answer is は. can someone explain why が is the answer please

7 comments

1. The feeling I get is we’re talking about cooking. The preceding sentence says that I wasn’t cooking. Then the sentence with (21) is answering the implied question of who was cooking.

2. Ask yourself the question, “where is the **new information** that the speaker most wants to convey?”

    

   In this context, we’ve already established that the speaker did not cook before coming to Japan. So, the implicit question is “if not the speaker, then **who** did the cooking?”

    

   The next important thing to note is that the **は** particle marks “mutually known” information. That is to say, in a sentence like AはB, everybody in the conversation *should* (generally speaking) already know what A is, so the “new information” in an AはB sentence is B.

   Conversely, the **が** particle can serve the opposite function, and so question words always take the が particle, e.g. there’s 何が…、誰が…、どれが…、いつが…. (In other words, you will never hear anyone ask 何はいいですか, it will always be 何が)

    

   Back to the question at hand, we’ve set up an implied question of “who did the cooking for the speaker?” In other words, 誰が…？ and in response, the matching answer is 母**が**.

3. から here heads a sub clause and usually the subject of a sub clause cannot be marked with は.

   からです can be extended to のは　　からです and in this context it would be

   日本に来る前にあまり料理をしなかったのは、国にいる母がいつも作ってくれたからです。

   So the preceding sentence is the topic here and the からです clause provides the reason for it.

4. regret the typo. should have written as お母さん instead. apologies

5. My favourite ​teaching trick that works in 99% of cases.

   When you can insert “Speaking of…” or “When it comes to…” in front of the word in question, ​the answer will be は.

   When you can insert “It is… that.. ” or “It is… who…”, then the answer is が.

   “That’s because, speaking of my mother, ​she was always cooking for me”

   “That’s because it was my mother who always cooked for me”.

   Which one makes more sense?

   Second, therefore, the answer is が.

6. Completely unrelated but why is it “おいしいと思います” and not “おいしいと 思います”. As in, I always find it interesting to see Japanese texts with spaces because it provides insight into where Japanese native speakers perceive logical places for word boundaries which the script obscures,. Every thing here I see matches up with my intuition, except for that part.

   In particular “作ってくれたからです” as one word without any spaces is telling.

   Oh, also “料理をしませんでした” surprises me. I would’ve expected “料理を しませんでした。” Are these simply mistakes or is this what matches up with the intuition of native speakers where spaces should be placed in full-spaced texts?

7. You can think of like, “My mom is the one who did all the cooking,” having already established that the speaker did not cook.