Avoiding the わたし/あなた trap…

 Also known as “well, this was a horrible grammar construction to meet out of the blue, thanks Duolingo!”

Duolingo does have a nasty habit of throwing new grammar points at you totally without any explanation as to why you got something wrong or what the correct form is instead. The classic one bring when they wanted us to translate “upper right” to Japanese … 「右上」is the correct answer, which is reversed from the order that seems natural in English.   This wasn’t in any of the tips, they just marked upper right wrong with no explanation. 

You can learn from your mistakes, but only if you know what those mistakes are… (I could sidebar here about the vocab test but I won’t.  Other than to say that given the verb to take a bath has に rather than を , I think it’s a perfectly reasonable assumption to decide that swimming in a pool would be に too!  And that putting grammar on a vocab test is unreasonable…).

That was a very long non-sidebar 😉 but today’s point is a new grammar construction I met in Duolingo (it’s usually been Japanese pod, and they explain things nicely, so you get an information post without associated complaints, so if you’re keeping score, if you want to spend money, Japanese pod is preferable to Duolingo  But if you don’t, Duolingo is free with annoying adverts etc, and you can practice writing katakana and hiragana on there  I don’t believe the Japanese pod site has that ability  I could be wrong because I get my Japanese pod access through Hello Talk…).

Ok, back to today’s grammar  we all get told that one shouldn’t say わたし/あなた, that they sound really clunky or arrogant, instantly identify you as foreign (like my red hair and general mien won’t 😜) and may even have you implying that you are dating someone or married to them…

So that’s a given, but they don’t tell you how to avoid using that pronoun when you need to add a particle to it… Cue Duolingo much much later giving me an option today and actually presenting it to translate from Japanese to English first rather than expecting you to come up with the grammar out of whole cloth, spring full formed from the Brie of Zeus, as it were.

Then to translate from English to Japanese…

As you can see from each image, we simply attach the possessive pronoun to the what question word instead of needing a you pronoun in there to attach to.  Bam, done! It’s implying it is your picture with the possessive pronoun, which makes sense, any picture you draw is intrinsically yours even if you sell it.  But doesn’t have anata in front of the no…  id probably not have thought of putting a の in the sentence and would have dropped the あなた out without it  which is probably also correct but might have sounded clunky or awkward for all I know (or since this is Duolingo, it could be the opposite way round ;)). 

But it does open up an interesting possibility of attaching particles to other items than the personal pronouns and still getting the same meaning across… Perhaps the 「わたしの友達」 construct could be avoided.  Perhaps not, I’ll have to actually ask someone who knows instead of building rules on the shaky foundation of one Duolingo question… 🤣

Update: sensei gave me feedback on the question (I told you I needed to ask someone) - the no here belongs to nani, it isn't skipping having the pronoun inhere by doing that.  It's dropping the pronoun because you can drop the pronoun.  Think of the "nani no" as "of what" will you draw a picture?