Originally Posted by OHayou (Post 874075)

and here is where I step in! Possibly the worst Japanese student on this website and also one of the slowest learners in the world. However, how to differentiate wa and ga is slowly starting to be understood by even the likes of me by this book:

--> Making Sense of Japanese (What the Textbooks Don't Tell you) by Jay Rubin (Shout out to KyleGoetz for suggesting this in one of his threads) which I received 2 days ago. <--

Jay Rubin is a professor of Japanese Literature at Harvard University and has been teaching for over 30 years.

The book is only 130 pages or so and he devotes 18 pages to the study of Wa and Ga.

Not Convinced? Some excerpts:

"After having differentiated the named topic from implied other potential topics, wa dumps its emphatic load on what comes after it. This makes it very different from ga, which emphasizes what comes before it.

Have you ever stopped to think about why you were taught never to use wa after interrogative words such as dare, nani, and dore? Because ga puts the emphasis on what immediately precedes it,"

"All wa ever does is tell you, "I know not about others of this category we've been talking about, but as for this one..." Wa tells you nothing about how its topic is going to relate to the upcoming information: it only tells you that some information is coming up that will be related somehow to the topic. In fact, the only way that you can tell whether wa marks an apparent subject or object (or anything else) in a sentence is in retrospect."

"Ga marks the grammatical subject of an upcoming verb or adjective, but wa marks the topic--not the topic of a verb, but the topic of an upcoming discussion."

Go buy the book and get it over with!

Originally Posted by masaegu (Post 874013)

Anyone willing to tell me which one is a construction worker? The other guy is probably a baseball player.
Guy A: "I broke the window." said with 「ボクが」
Guy B: "I broke the window," said with 「ボクは」

Originally Posted by Maxful (Post 874291)

「ボクは」 = Construction worker

「ボクが」 = Baseball player

Am I right?

Originally Posted by masaegu (Post 874013)

かぎがある？Do (you) have key? Sounds strange. Use 「は」 though it still wil sound strange. I do not know what 「かぎがある？」 even means.
(regardless if your talking about a specific key, or a key in general).

Originally Posted by masaegu (Post 874019)

"I wanna ask this guy if he has a gf".　”彼女はいますか Correct.

"I wanna ask this guy if his girlfriend is here "彼女がいますか" Incorrect.

Originally Posted by Maxful (Post 874295)

How about "かぎはあるの？"?

Originally Posted by Maxful (Post 874298)

And also, are "犬はいるの？", "犬はいますか。" and "犬を持っていますか。" correct when asking someone "Do you have dog?"？

Originally Posted by Maxful (Post 874305)

"彼女はいますか" sounds to me like can mean both "Do you have a girlfriend" and "Is your girlfriend in".

Please correct me if I am wrong.

Originally Posted by Maxful (Post 874416)

Anyway, regarding ""かぎはあるの？", what I meant was, for example, Ralph is going to his grandmother's house with his brother Roy, but grandmother isn't going to be at home, so Roy asks if Ralph has the key to the house with him. So what should Roy say in this situation?

Originally Posted by masaegu (Post 874432)

チョコレートのパンを持っているのです。In this case, it means that the speaker is holding the bread. Drop the first 「の」 and change the verb form to 「持っています」.