[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