Why is 好き used like this?

7 comments

1. study some grammar. you probably are trying to look at it through the eyes of the grammar of your native tongue.

2. 女の人 (woman) is being described by an adjectival phrase 歴史**が**好きな (likes history) – so it’s “The woman who likes history” (or “women who like history”).

   Edit: I changed か to が as I assumed you mistyped it.

3. Suki na is an adjective, it works differently than the verb “to like” but still carries the meaning of something being favoured

   Basically think of it as “the history-liking women”

4. What you seem to be confused about is the use of “〜が”. “好き” is what is called a na-adjective in Japanese. Japanese adjectives are very verb-like in that they can actually take objects, but often with adjectives, and other stative verbs by the way, the object is in the nominative case, not the accusative case, so “好き” has two arguments in the nominative case.

   “女の人__が__歴史__が__好きだ。” this means something like “The woman likes history.” The confusing part is that it, in theory also could mean “The woman, history likes.”, but that’s unlikely, however “歴史が女の人が好きだ。” would of course be taken to mean as “History, the woman likes.” because persons are generally the things that like history, not the other way around.

   So, the confusing thing with many of the adjectives, and verbs, that take nominative-objects is that both the object and the subject use “〜が”, the only way to tell which is which is often context, but that’s nothing unusual for Japanese.

   It’s all the more confusing because “好き” is one of the adjectives that very often nowadays also seems to be taking accusative objects and uses “〜を” instead for the object. This was historically not considered correct but is very common today.

   So “Xが好きなY” for this reason is entirely ambiguous, it can mean “Y who likes X” or “Y whom X likes”. Context differentiates this.

   But, there are other ways to differentiate it:

   – as said, nowadays “Xを好きなX” also occurs this is not ambiguous.
   – “Xのことが好きなY” also occurs, when “〜のこと” is used for a slightly different nuacne, to make it more personable, which incidentally is thus only used with persons where the ambiguity would arise in this case, it is always on the object.

   You will probably encounter many cases of “nominative objects” in Japanese which will be confusing. These are always used with stative verbs and very often many of them can take either nominative or accusative objects with no change in meaning. Many people will even try to rationalize that they’re actually subjects to simplify things at first but I’d advise against buying into that too much because other explanations fall apart when trying to think of them as subjects. “好き” has both a subject and an object, both can be in the nominative case using “〜が”, the object can also be in the accusative case using “〜を” and other than that they both follow the normal grammatical rules that subject and objects do. For instance using the honorrific version “XがYがお好きになる”, the status of the subject is elevated, not the object, it sounds arrogant using it with oneself as the subject.

5. I believe they are called ‘relative causes’. They are usually verbs or adjectives that describe a noun. For examples:

   住んでいる家 = The house in which I live.

   好きな食べ物 = The food in which I like.

   買った靴 = The shoes in which I bought.

   You can use present or past forms of verbs and adjectives to describe a noun (and possibly other verbs and adjectives… but I’m still a learner so I’m not sure of that).

   Relative clauses can be tricky to hear / translate in fast speaking, as English speakers tend to reorder Japanese sentence structure to fit what they are used to hearing. Essentially, if you hear a verb describing a noun, it is most likely a relative clause.

6. answers to your particular question have already been provided in this thread

   but on a general note, if you are confused by examples like that you should understand that unlike english japanese (normally) **DOES NOT** use such pronouns as “who”, “what”, “which”…

   english: “the person **who** told me that”

   japanese: “watashi ni sore wo hanashita hito”

   the “who” part from the english version is absent in the japanese one because the syntax in these languages is structured differently

7. が does not always symbolize the subject of the entire sentence but can be a sort of “reference pointer” for things that follow it. The most important character to clue you in here is な which is an adjectival linker that points to the thing following it in turn, the woman. So in English terms you have to think of 歴史が好きな as essentially one big adjective describing a noun.

   Another important thing to know about 好き is that you can’t just translate it to how “like” works in English even though the meaning is similar. It’s not a verb, it’s more like an adjectival noun. The more literal way to translate it would be to an adjective like precious or dear. Xが好き = “X is dear to me.”

   歴史が好きな女の人 in a more literal translation is more akin to “the woman to whom history is dear,” but it sounds unnatural when you translate it that way because that’s not how you would phrase that expression in English.