I just recently started learning the language, so I’m still not very comfortable with the use of particles. However, I believed that for indication of time, we use ‘ni’. For example, if I wanted to translate ‘I hang out with my friends on the weekend’, I would say ‘shuumatsu ni tomodachi to asobimasu’. However, the app I’m using says ‘shuumatsu wa tomodachi to asobimasu’. Now, is that a nuance about certain time phrases that I’m missing, or is that latter sentence just highlighting ‘the weekend’ as the topic, ie saying ‘As for the weekends, I hang out with my friends’. In that case, is the former translation still grammatically accurate, or is it an error to use shuumatsu ni in this context? Can someone elaborate on the differences between the two more?
2 comments
It could be either.
Ni focuses our attention on the time and makes it sound like “only on weekends.”
Wa sounds more contrastive and like there’s more context that we should know.
A: いつ学校に行きますか。When do you go to school?
B: 平日に学校に行きます。I go on weekdays.
A: そうですか。I see.
B: でも、週末はたいてい友達と遊びます。But, on the weekends, I usually hangout with friend
Edit: typo
Basically when you say any sentence, there are different variations about your indented aim to talk about something. Like you can talk about weekends specifically, or you can talk about what you do, or about hanging out with your friends or something else. All these potentially can use absolutely the same words, and only would differ either in particles you use like here, or some context, in what situation it was used, because there are 4 locations where topic can be (subject, predicate, context and occurrence for actions/events), but only 1 (subject) can be explicitly marked with は. So it’s 3-to-1, either you have explicit topic-は, or your topic is one of 3 other potential locations.
This is why it’s almost impossible to judge an isolated sentence, it’s fine by itself. It could be wrong only when it’s used in wrong context. For example, look at such situation.
– Where is John?
– WENT to a shop! (with intonation emphasis on went)
It’s wrong, right? Why would we emphasize it like this? This is predicate topic ( John is the subject, and went is the action he did, the predicate of the sentence) used in situations when we need context topic, because we talk about contextual “Where is he?”. And this is why quite often English speakers find は hard or confusing. In English a sentence like “she is beautiful” can have both subject and predicate topics without any indication. In real life, it typically differs a bit. Subject-topic simply talks about her and you give a bit of description about her like “She works there, lives there and she is beautiful”, but predicate topic talks about “beautiful”, it’s like a question “Who is beautiful in this world?” and you answer “she is, she is the one”. This is why there can be such a big difference simply depending if we use は like 彼女は美しい, and if we don’t use は like 彼女が美しい. It completely changes about what we talk and our intention, while the same in English can be mostly conveyed only indirectly, as pronouncing it with a huge amount of admiration in your voice.
You can also notice that we have absolutely the same ideas in English, we can emphasize different parts of the sentence. It’s just done using different tools and approaches and the only thing people need to do is to coordinate.