Is this correct? (dropping particles and です/ます)

7 comments

1. It would be “correct,” yeah, dropping particles happens frequently in colloquial Japanese

   That being said, in a lot of cases it obviously sounds more casual too, so just watch your formality level, and make sure you don’t omit too much to the point where it makes your sentences harder to understand

   Edit: spelling

2. Typically, you’d use 肉**が**好きじゃない for grammatical correctness. I wouldn’t be surprised if Japanese natives dropped the が though (but I don’t know for sure). The です at the end is only decorative and formal – so skip it for informal.

   Using 肉は gives it a different interpretation though – It has a contrast flavor to it – it’s “I don’t like meat (but I like other stuff – e.g. fruit)”.

   Duolingo is not the best place to learn Japanese.

3. You’re not wrong, but DuoLingo wants you to learn “textbook Japanese”

4. duolingo cannot adjust for different correct answers, it’s just not sophisticated enough

5. If duolingo wants everything　私は肉が好きです would be correct. In Short U would say 肉が好き i think IT IS Not normal to drop the ga particle in this Case atleast doesnt feel right to me

6. Object-marking を gets dropped the most in casual convo. に can also get dropped in casual convo with the verb 行く. 学校に行く->学校行く. You have to be aware that topics can be expressed with a 、 (slight pause or no pause in speech) instead of using the は particle; topics expressed that way don’t have the contrastive force of は. E.g. something like「これ、変な匂いしない？」 (Doesn’t this smell weird?) which in textbook Japanese would be 「これは変な匂いがしない？」 , which sounds a little unusual. I think the problem is that many rules are for formal written Japanese, not for spoken Japanese, and attempting to apply every written Japanese rule to spoken Japanese will make the spoken Japanese sound unusual. There are also slight differences in preference among different generations of speakers and different dialects.

   Dropping です/ます is not “dropping” them. It’s just using the plain forms of the verbs to begin with. Using です/ます is rather adding them. And yes, copulas like だ/です are dropped for certain sentence types and retained for others in casual speech.

   Also, if Duo rejects a sentence, it doesn’t mean that sentence is entirely wrong. Programmers have not yet figured out a way to automatically get a computer to accept every possible plausibly correct sentence.

7. My suggestion is to crank up your listening antenna a bit to check on something. It is entirely possible that the GA is just devoiced while the beat in the sentence remains. Listen to see if the beat remains even though the GA is not actually said.

   In conversations with people trying to work out why some new speakers (English natives speaking Japanese, and Japanese natives speaking English) sound so odd, it seems like GA is rarely completely eliminated while WO gets completely dropped without even a blank space remaining. I like to think it is precisely because subjects are never necessary to a Japanese sentences meaning but objects are, but that’s just me.

   I try and help J-people sound more natural in English, and I stress they have to leave the beat in the English sentence for things that we mostly do not say in English. Even though textbooks say this does not happen in Japanese it clearly does. But the mechanism seems different. We have to say the sound in English, and just turn the vowel into a schwa. Japanese just leaves the beat, and eliminates the vowel (and seemingly sometimes the consonant) as well.

   We devoice and change vowel sounds in English (I’m going t’d’ store) Japanese tends to not brutalize the vowel sounds, but still does something somewhat parallel by just leaving the beat. It’s worth keeping track of the difference so that you do not start brutalizing vowel sounds out of habit from speaking English , and instead just eliminate the vowel sound while keeping the beat. If you turn vowels into schwa when speaking Japanese it becomes incomprehensible fairly quickly. Japanese is serious about vowel sounds.