[panorama]

Beginner question: In casual, spoken Japanese, I've been taught that I can drop the particles (including pronouns). Hence "watashi wa tabemasu" can be colloquially shortened to "tabemasu".

Thanks to this article, I've come to understand particles much better and why they're important, but does it change in casual spoken Japanese? Are some particles okay to drop whereas others are kept? Thanks in advance.

[sdrothrock]

> I can drop the particles (including pronouns)

Sure. "piza wo taberu?" can be "piza taberu?" and that's fine, even normal.

> (including pronouns)

This is different and I think there are a few misconceptions bundled up in this assumption.

1. Particles don't exist on their own; they're permanently linked to the word that precedes them; if you've ever studied a Romance language, you can think of them as a way of declining nouns.

So "watashi wa" is the nominative, "watashi wo" is the accusative.

2. Pronoun dropping is done in the sense that the pronoun is not essential to the sentence and can be inferred from context.

For example, if you and your friend are eating and you ask "motto taberu [gonna eat more?]," nobody's going to be confused about whether the subject of that sentence is "watashi wa" or "anata wa."

It happens in English, too, but people overthink it a lot when presented with it consciously in Japanese.

[laurieg]

"Dropping the pronoun" is a very English way of thinking about things. In English sentences have to have subjects. Consider the following paragraph:

John went to the shop. John bought a cake. John took it to Bill's house. John and Bill ate the cake.

It's not grammatically wrong, but it's clunky. We just use pronouns to sound 'normal' in English:

John went to the shop. He bought a cake. He took it to Bill's house. They ate the cake.

In Japanese instead of changing a noun (John) to a pronoun (he) you just don't say the subject if it hasn't changed:

John went to the shop, bought a cake and took it to Bill's house. They ate the cake.

Which, as you can see, is something that works in English at times too.

[panorama]

Thanks. Sorry for the confusion; I have a decent understanding of when pronouns can be dropped, but my question was moreso about when particles can be dropped. For instance, from the linked article, this sentence:

Tarō wa Noriko wo toshokan de mimashita.

In casual spoken Japanese, can any of these particles (wa, wo, de) be dropped?

[fenomas]

None in that case. I don't know of any general rules for when particles can be dropped, but sitting here thinking of examples, it's usually done for simple, direct sentences where the particle would be tying together two words whose relationship is already obvious:

> eiga miru?

> ano hon, suki?

> ame futte kita.

> okaasan iru?

And so on. But I don't think that's a rule you can work backwards from, it just describes all the cases that occur to me.

[iamnotlarry]

generally, no

[teraflop]

Well, to be clear, particles and pronouns are very different things. (In fact, Japanese pronouns basically just act like nouns, from a grammatical perspective.)

Japanese is a so-called "pro-drop" language, which means it's normal to omit pronouns completely when they can be inferred. "Watashi wa tabemasu" would only be used for specific emphasis, as in: "I specifically (as opposed to somebody else you were just talking about) am eating." In any other context, it sounds unnatural, and you would just say "tabemasu" even in formal situations.

Separately, you can omit particles in colloquial speech when they're obvious. So for instance, in a polite setting you might ask "ashita wa, nani wo shimasu ka?" (meaning "what are you doing tomorrow?") But in a casual environment, you could say "ashita, nani suru?" and still be understood perfectly.

[klodolph]

That's a common question... and unfortunately the answer is that "watashi wa tabemasu" and "tabemasu" are absolutely different from each other and you can't just go around substituting one for the other. You also can't really translate the difference between the two of them, but in context, a good translation might be:

Watashi wa tabamasu. -> As for me, I'm eating.

Tabemasu. -> I'm eating.

It bears repeating: this depends on context. But you can see how "watashi wa" sticks out like a sore thumb, and you can instantly recognize novice Japanese second-language speakers because they say "watashi wa" all the time. And you'll later learn that "watashi" is sometimes an inappropriate way to refer to yourself...

[joshka]

There's another article on the site [1] that explains this in detail. It seems that you can drop the "watashi wa" only when the context of the statement or answer is obvious from previous parts of the conversation.

[1]: https://8020japanese.com/wa-vs-ga/#comparison

[iamnotlarry]

As others have commented here, Japanese relies heavily on inference. Subjects and topics are very commonly dropped.

I shouldn't say that the language relies on inference. Rather, speakers of Japanese rely on inference. It's like chaining functions in some languages.

Car.rent().driveTo(work).park().driveTo(lunch).wash().

By the time you get to the washing in the conversation, the car is hard to find in the sentence, and the driver never does appear. But they are both there if you go looking.

[DrPhish]

In general, you can drop everything except the jitsugo (verb or adjective most usually) if the other bits can be inferred.

eg: Taberu (eat) or Hayai (fast)

It sounds like cavemen talk if you translate it literally, but it is perfectly valid japanese

[klodolph]

Syntactically we might call "hayai" a verb, which would then be translated as "is fast" rather than just "fast". Semantically, it is an adjective.