“彼は英語がかなり得意です”
The が (which my understanding indicates the previous word is the subject) follows 英語, making that the subject. But the English translation I have been given of this is “He is very good at English.” But isn’t “he” the subject of that sentence? So why in the Japanese sentence would the subject be 英語?
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I recommend Cure Dolly’s videos to help you stop thinking in terms of English grammar and realize that Japanese is its own language. If we translate that sentence literally, it becomes something like “As for him, English is quite his forte/strong suit”. 得意 is a noun, but it can also act as a な adjective, which is nothing more than a noun that we attach to other nouns by use of な instead of the usual の.
You shouldn’t be trying to translate between the two languages word-for-word literally. The languages’ respective ways of expressing things and grammatical structures are just too different from each other for that to turn out well.
“He is very good at English” is a good translation in this case because it’s idiomatic english that gets the meaning of the original across faithfully. If you want an extremely literal “translationese” rendering, it would be something like “As for him, English is very much a strong point.”
definitely break out of trying to map english grammar to japanese, the basic structure of most sentences doesn’t have the same things in the same order. in particular, は and です have literally no translation in any way. they serve purposes but cannot be translated directly
in your example, we have probably the most common pattern in all of japanese:
XはYがZ
there’s no english direct equivalent for this, you need to internalize the general structure on it’s own
in *very* broad terms, you can think of it as “as for X, its/his Y property has a Z value or state”. that’s a terrible translation but it’s more or less the general idea
When you use 好きだ(すきだ), 嫌いだ(きらいだ), 得意だ(とくいだ), 苦手だ(にがてだ), 出来る(できる) or 出来ない(できない), you use は for the subject and が for the object.
Like…
私(わたし)は彼(かれ)が好き(すき)だ。
I like him.
彼女(かのじょ)は彼(かれ)が嫌い(きらい)だ。
She didn’t like him.
母(はは)は料理(りょうり)が得意(とくい)だ。
My mom is good at cooking.
弟(おとうと)は数学(すうがく)が苦手(にがて)だ。
My little brother is not good at math.
私(わたし)は英語(えいご)を話す(はなす)ことが出来る(できる)。
I can speak English.
彼(かれ)は泳ぐ(およぐ)ことが出来ない(できない)。
He can’t swim.
Who told you “he” isn’t the subject of the sentence?
Why are you trying to find the subject from the japanese grammar in the english translation? Focus on the japanese sentence and you’re fine. Of course japanese grammar doesn’t apply to english.
OP I know that a lot of resources call the は and が (especially) particles the “subject” marking particles but I find that very reductive and often misleading.
The concept of subject is simply “the one who does the action” and that’s it, that’s the only thing you should be looking for. The issue is that individuating the subject of a verb is not guaranteed to “translate” directly in meaning to another language. We don’t have topic markers in English so that’s an entire nuance of the original language that is gone in translation
This works in reverse too, or rather it doesn’t work. When we want to say “today it will rain” in Japanese, if you were to try and translate it directly, it would be extremely confusing because what the hell is this “it” subject?
It isn’t a subject, and explanations that try to translate it as “As for him, he’s quite good at English.” or something similar are just trying to wrangle it into being an internal subject when it is not. “得意” is an adjective that can take a nominative-object. It means “to be good at”. Many stative verbs can also take nominative objects, and these often become accusative-objects in subordinate clauses. So while “私は英語を得意だ。” does not generally occur. “英語を得意な人” or “私はあの人が英語を得意だと思う。” do occur because there they are subordinate clauses which have a tendency, though not an absolute rule, to swap out nominative objects for accusative objects.
Essentially. Japanese adjectives are very verb-like in that they can take objects, most of them however put both the object and the subject in the nominative case, using “〜が” for both, but in subordinate clauses will more readily use “〜を” for the object. A minority will even show the accusative in main clauses. Many stative verbs also follow this pattern.
Trying to think of this as “As for him, his English is good.” to hold on to the idea that it’s actually a subject, rather than simply an object which happens to use the nominative case might seem attractive as first, but then one runs into troubles such as:
– Why does it use the accusative case so often in subordinate clauses?
– Why do some people even use the accusative case for it in main clauses at times?
– Why do forms such as “得意になりたい”, “得意でありながら”, or “お得意です” treat it like an object and not a subject?
Essentially, Japanese is a language with what are called “quirky cases”, the pattern that sometimes parts of the sentence are in a case one would not expect them to be. In particular, like many languages who display this, such as most famously Icelandic, what is particularly common are nominative objects, and dative subjects. For instance in “XにYがわかる” as in “X understands Y” the subject is in the dative case, and the object in the nominative case. Some people will try to explain this as saying that Y is actually the subject, and that it thus means “X is understandable to Y”; this sounds attractive on a quick glance, but the reason the mainstream linguistic analysis still posits X as the subject and Y as the object, is that apart from the cases, for every other rule of how subjects and objects behave in Japanese, they behave that way.
P.s.: one more thing: do not fall into the trapping of thinking that __all__ cases of “XはYがVERB” are nominative objects. The confusing part is that Japanese also has something called a “double subject construction” where “As for X, Y verbs” is actually the correct analysis because the above arguments I gave don’t apply to it. A common example of this is “象は鼻が長い。” or “Elephants have long noses.” but more literally “As for elephants, [their] noses are long.” The existence of this probably makes people analyse nominative objects like they are the same, but all the arguments I gave as to why nominative-objects are actually objects don’t apply here. “長い” is intransitive, it has a subject, no object to speak of. So “象が鼻を長いと思う。” makes no sense among other things.