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In English, you can say something like "He ate it", but just saying "Ate" as an utterance by itself is ungrammatical. On the other hand, in Japanese and other "pro-drop" languages, you can freely omit pronouns unless they're necessary for disambiguation. You can use pronouns in Japanese to clarify the subject or object of a verb, but it's not nearly as common to do as in English. For instance: when addressing somebody politely, you would typically refer to them either by name (with an appropriate honorific) if you know it, or a suitable title (like sensei for a teacher, or okyakusan for a customer). There are situations where you would instead use a second-person pronoun like anata, including as a fall-back if you don't know how else to address a stranger, but it's not at all the default choice as it is in English. Another way this crops up is through the use of so-called "benefactive" constructions. For instance, hon wo kashite kureta could be translated as "[he/she/you] lent me a book", and hon wo kashite ageta means "I lent [him/her/you] a book". The difference has nothing to do with pronouns; it's that you use a different auxiliary verb when describing something that was done for the benefit of the speaker, or for the benefit of someone else. Similarly, Japanese has a variety of honorific language which, in polite/formal situations, is used to speak respectfully about others and humbly about oneself (or one's "in-group", such as family members or coworkers). So the choice of wording can convey who you're talking about, without needing to explicitly use pronouns. |