Just some stuff about me.
Here's my dotfiles repository.
What links here:
が marks the subject, は the topic.
Every sentence has a が, sometimes it’s invisible. If you say 「さくらです」, the implied part is 「(私が)さくらです」. 「Xは。。。」 could be translated as, “As for X, …”.
If somebody in a restaurant says, 「私はうなぎです」, they’re not saying “I am an eel”. It implies 「私は(implied subject が)ううなぎです」, meaning “As for me, (implied subject) is eel”, where “implied subject” is the dish/lunch/dinner.
In ◯は_____ vs. ◯が_____ sentences, it helps to understand that usually when we formulate a sentence, half of the sentence has the “new/important” information (or, in questions, the information that we’re seeking), meanwhile the other half of the sentence is just for framing that important thing. は marks ◯ as the ‘topic’ of conversation. This topic should be familiar to everyone in the conversation, right? “As for [thing you don’t know about], …” is weird, even in English. Because of this, I like to say that は should always mark a familiar topic. Hence, the “new information” in ◯は_____ phrases should always be whatever is filling the blank. Now for ◯が_____. Compared to the は counterpart, this sounds A LOT like we are answering/confirming that ◯ is whatever the blank says. This is also why question words like 何、誰、どこ、どれ、etc. are basically glued to が. The question “誰が_____?” feels like asking “Who is/does/will _?” Then, the answer, “田中さんが_____” feels like “Tanaka-san is/does/will _.”
There’s one other really big difference between は and が usage: は feels contrastive, which means that when you make a statement like ◯は[A], it sounds like things that are not ◯ are also not [A].
In the sentence, “do you have any hobbies”:
きみはたべたの。focuses on the action: “as for you, ate?” きみがたべたの。focuses on the subject: “are you the one who ate?”
https://selftaughtjapanese.com/2021/02/08/the-adventures-of-wa-ga-question-sentences/