Tutor Session, Friday June 10th

 Met with Lauren on Zoom, chatted about where when we have group work descending en masse would be ok, or people tend to just drop in one by one randomly.  Also remembered to actually ask a question I had had for ages (not as easy to google on as some of them) - in Duolingo they had eventually, reluctantly explained about は as the topic marker、か as as the question marker (although wider reading showed other uses/more subtle shades, and a deep dive on particles via a google search got a better label for it of “the unknown particle”、が which Duolingo seems to describe as a topic marker but for more surprising news/information (anything related to language always seems to be surprising on Duolingo - if someone’s mother speaks Korean, its always ごが)、and finally をwhich Duolingo said was for the object of an action.  Really important to know if Sakura is eating sushi, or if you picked up a horror book by accident and it is the other way around…   But every time that a sentence like that is in the negative (& we’ll ignore their tendency to over use pronouns for the time being), and they give you a sentence that says something like すしを食べます, you get a negative that goes すしはたべません - and they never bothered to explain why it was は、not を.  

In English, that would still be the object of the verb, even though you are not doing anything to it anymore.  I had hypothesized that in Japanese, if you are not doing an action to something, it ceases to be an object, so now it is a topic, and I remembered to check that with Lauren and she agreed that was the exact reason for it.  So I can now stick a pin in it & not worry about that rule & if there were some exceptions that would trip me up because I hadn’t deduced the right rule.  It is things like that which made me want to take this course instead of just learning by myself.  That scattershot approach to Grammar was not impressing me & I worried that I would have some horrible pitfall later when it would be harder to unlearn than going through from the start now.  There’s a nonzero chance that I could have tested out of this course, given the work that I have been doing since January, but it wouldn’t resolve any of the lurking minefield items.  Plus I would rather get used to doing college work again whilst working full time when I have a bit of a leg up on the subject matter, than diving in the deep end totally on both level of work & getting used to classes & assignments again.