Maybe a stupid question bur は marks the topic of a sentence and is often translated as “As for X”. So can’t you basically make almost every subject or object the topic of a sentence and therefore は would be able to replace が and を？
Example: マリはリンゴをたべた。here Mari is the topic (and subject) and the apple is the object. So basically (as for Mari (she) ate the apple”
But you could also make the apple the topic of the sentence, couldn’t you? (As for the apple, Mari ate it) . Here リンゴ being the topic (and object) of the sentence and マリ the subject. So would by that logic リンゴはマリが食べた。also work to say Mari ate the apple or am I applying too English thinking.
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If you want to make “apple” the topic, wouldn’t you need passive voice? As in “The apple was eaten by Mari.”
Yes, that works. Whether it makes sense in the context is another matter, but grammatically it’s fine and you have the right meaning as well.
You’re correct in picking up on the fact that particles give Japanese a more fluid word order than English. マリはリンゴを食べた and リンゴはマリが食べた are both grammatically correct, in the strict sense, but they don’t necessarily sound natural without context. は can often be used to emphasize a certain part of the sentence. For example, マリはリンゴを食べた sounds most like the response to “What did Mari eat?”, whereas リンゴはマリが食べた sounds like I asked you something akin to “What happened to the apple?” (although in real life you would likely omit the リンゴは part of your response).
In theory yes. It often helps though to remember that there is always a semantic subject and object even when they’re being moved into the context by は.
は can’t be used for introducing new items though – you need to use が for that. The topic must be something already known about or something the speaker assumes the listener(s) already know about (e.g. the weather).
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A lof ot が and を can be replaced with は, but basically you need to understand that our topic can be something else besides a subject. It can be predicate, it can be context, or it can be occurrence for events. Think about such common situation, if we want to introduce something new like “Once upon a time there was …”, then out topic isn’t the subject at all. Our goal is to describe the situation itself. Such sentence wouldn’t have any explicit は and while technically we can replace such が with は (and some authors actually do so), it’s similar to starting like “The Smiths”, which kinda makes to ponder “Do I actually know them?”, “Am I expected to know them?” and so on.