Kate-san,

Don’t feel presured to catch up. The beauty of podcasts and  learning via the internet is that you can learn in your own time at your own pace.

Mina-san, thanks for your comments

I am fairly new to JapanesePod101 — around 2-3 weeks now — and am taking this lesson for the first time. And so I was a bit surprised that no one was around to answer your question of July 2008 before now. It appears to be a pattern that there will be a flurry of posts right after a lesson is first published, and then nothing. It even appears that no one who watches the website even knows that a new post has been made on a particular topic, such as yours.

I suppose that we just have to accept the fact that those of us who are joining the lessons at a later time just will not get any care or attention from the main site people — but that won’t prevent us from helping each other, even though that help may be months in coming. Kind of sad, actually, when you think about it. ちょっと　恥ずかしいじゃない？

Anyway, to answer your question: Why did Take say “Take de ii desu?” Because Take-san’s full first name is really “Takeya,” and so when he responded (during the introductions part of the conversation) by saying only “Take,” Peter checked with him to make sure it was OK if Peter used the shortened version of his first name. (” ‘Take’ de ii desu ka?) In that case, the “de” is the right particle for this situation.

By now, Andre, you probably know this — a sign of your progress. But for any others who may come upon this, I hope it will help.

Regards,
Tommy

Gene

the “ga” particle can be used in multiple ways, which I think is what’s hanging you up. In the sentence from the lesson, it is as Jean-Michel described - the subject is “watashii wa” and has been dropped, as it’s expected to be understood.

However, ga can also be used to draw attention to the subject in certain cases, and that seems to be the way you read the sentence. For example:

dare ga kinou tokyo ni ikimashita ka? - Who went to Tokyo yesterday?
X-san ga ikimashita - Mr./ Ms. [X] went

in this case, ga is used as the subject marker, but it’s only in a very specific situation as a question & response where the subject itself is the most important, newly revealed piece of information. You would not use ga as the subject marker without the conversation already being in the context of the subject’s identity being the unknown or unexpected part of the sentence.

Certainly, the tone of the sentence “demo, anata ga suki desu kara-” is one where the speaker is saying something only to build the foundation for the next statement… you would not be saying that and drawing focus to a new person at the same time.

Hopefully I can help you with this one.

The sentence you are mentioning can be regarded as a variant of the “A wa B ga C” construction, which is very typical for Japanese. Key sentences (taken from Makino and Tsutsui’s grammar) are:

(1) watashi wa futtobôru ga suki desu : I like football
(2) Hanako wa me ga kirei desu : Hanako has pretty eyes
(3) jisho wa Webusutâ ga ii desu : Talking about dictionaries, Webster is good

All three examples correspond to the same structure, but with somewhat different meanings :
In (1), A is a person, and “B ga C” expresses physical or mental state
In (2), B is a part of A, and “B ga C” expresses something about B, thereby giving information about A
In (3), B is a member of a group represented by A, and “B ga C” expresses a property of B

Your question thus relates to case (1), except that the topic (normally marked by wa) is omitted. The word marked by ga represents the object of like (or dislike).

Other expressions which require the same construction as “suki” here are
wakaru (be understandable, understand), dekiru (can be done, can do), mieru (be visible), jôzu/heta (good/poor at), hoshii (desirable), hitsuyô (necessary), kirai (be disliked), kowaii (fearful), etc.

Things become a little more confusing in subordinate clauses where the topic marker ~wa itself changes to ~ga as in:
Watashi GA osake GA sukina koto wa minna shite imasu : everybody knows that I like sake.

Hope this helps,

Jean-Michel

There’s definitely something grammatical I’m not understanding in this lesson, or maybe in general; in the notes, the romaaji says, “demo, anata ga suki desu kara-” and then the rest of the sentence, et cetera. This apparently translates to “Because I like you-”, but what I initially got out of it when reading was, “Because you like it-”. I feel totally stupid for not understanding this, but I guess my grasp of Japanese grammar is such that I stumble on this kind of stuff. Is there something I’m missing? Can anyone give me a tip for how to piece sentences like this together more effectively? Onegai shimasu!

I humbly submit myself to your judgement!

Gene