Problems with particles


I'm trying to understand when to use appropriate particles in a sentence, and
keep up with vocab too! Please someone help.

customer: "そのぼうし[の, を, か, ね] ください"

"たけしさん [か, の, よ, or no particle] せんもんはれきしです"




> "そのぼうし[の, を, か, ね] ください"
>
> well for example the customers line of "excuse me, that shirt ___ _ please,
> I'm hazy on which participle to put there.

Don't translate word-for-word. Better yet, try not to translate _at all_ , as
far as is possible. Japanese word order is very different to English word
order, and the functions of the words differ too - some things that are verbs
in English are adjectives in Japanese, and so on. Not to mention that English
doesn't _have_ case particles, so translating into English to figure out which
particle to use is a really strange idea! Trust me - understand the Japanese
sentences as they are and you will save yourself huge headaches later.

I'll explain this one in detail. ください can indeed mean "please". This is the
reason you got tied up a little bit - the English word "please" isn't
obviously any word that can take a noun _at all_. So how are you supposed to
know which particle it's correct to attach to the noun that "please" takes,
when "please" doesn't take a noun?! Of course, the answer is simply that
English and Japanese are incredibly different things, and ください and "please"
are incredibly different things. They just happen to be good translations of
each other sometimes.

Ramble aside. You should examine the Japanese - the whole reason it comes to
be translated as "please" is that it is _actually_ the imperative form of
くださる, meaning "to give" (usually "to me"; hence it can also mean "do (for
me)"; and it's a so-called 'humble' word, so it has polite connotations). So,
your translation should start "Give me...". Is it now obvious that そのぼうし
("that hat") is the direct object of your sentence? The correct particle is を.

> "たけしさん [か, の, よ, or no particle] せんもんはれきしです"

Takeshi-san ... specialty: history.

This sentence is probably intended to mean "Takeshi-san's specialty is
history". That is, the noun "Takeshi-san" is modifying "history" - we would
normally think of this in English as a _possessive_. The Japanese particle
that is going to do the job is の.

As a few rules of thumb: よ and ね will usually be found at the end of a
sentence, and so will か (when it's a question marker); you don't usually find
two nouns next two each other without a particle joining them (though you do
in long names of organisations and so on); and a noun will normally need
particles like を, で, に if it is somehow an object of a verb (unless that verb
is する, and except in very casual speech). But don't let any of this think
you're off the hook - learn it properly, or it will plague you for as long as
you're learning Japanese!

