Are bananas what you want?

Bunpro
#1

About a month ago I came back to learning Japanese after around a decade away, I have effectively started fresh, and while I have some understanding I still struggle with the nuance around the fundamentals.

Today, I ran into this in my review queue, and despite being quite a simple sentence it has caused me a tremendous amount of confusion:Untitled-1
Not knowing the word「欲しい」, I looked it up:Untitled-2
Okay, so we’ve got one or more bananas, there is a want or desire, and it’s a question. From this I immediately understood the intended English translation of the sentence, bananas + want narrows it down to a handful of options, and finally it being in the form of a question implies the asking of another person, (i.e. It’s probably “Do you want a banana(s)?” or “Do you want a/the banana?”).

However, when it came to choosing the “correct” Japanese particle I was still at a loss. Is it

  • 「（あなたが）バナナを欲しいですか」i.e. Do you have a desire which acts upon this banana?
  • 「（あなたが）バナナに欲しいですか」i.e. Do you have a desire for which a banana is the target?
  • 「（あなたが）バナナは欲しいですか」i.e. Do you, regarding bananas, have desire?
  • 「（あなたは）バナナが欲しいですか」i.e. For you, does the banana have the quality of being desired?

I tried all of these (in that order), only looking at the hints once the fourth was accepted.

Untitled-3
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Now, while reading this hint would likely have caused me to pick が over は (if I had already narrowed it down to those two), I don’t think it would have prevented me from trying my first two answers. In fact, reading over the page for が once more I’m struggling to find any mention of anything close to “single pieces of information” or “stand out”, are these meant to just be coy ways of referring to the word subject or am I missing something deeper?

So, where’s the issue here? Is it the hint, my understanding of grammar, or my vocabulary (specifically 欲しい), perhaps even a little of all? Are all of my sentences (and my literal interpretations of them) correct, and if not, what are the issues? How can you tell which “direction” an adjective applies, i.e. is A wanted by B or does A want B?

This has also made me realise that my understanding of certain areas may be quite a bit better or worse than an on-the-face-of-it reading of the reviews would suggest, as I believe that my understanding of particle in question (が) is pretty solid, but my first two answers would be wrong for reasons that appear to relate more to the use of an adjective. Meanwhile, reviews on similar adjectives have often (to my recollection) been as trivial as to just copy the word provided into the empty space.

#2

Others will be better than I at explaining and analyzing, but what I can say is :

-は/が is hard and there’s ton of articles, videos, threads about how to use them. But I think you mostly get it with exposition, don’t stress too much about it for now.
-が欲しい is kind of a set phrase (N4 grammar point). When starting japanese, I would’t have known which one to use in this sentence. Now I couldn’t say why it’s が, I just know it is.
-Hints are sometimes a bit obscure, at least to me.

Also を is used with verbs to mark an action being performed on something
本を読む - to read a book
バナナを食べる - to eat a banana
タバコを吸う - to smoke tobacco/a cigarette
As 欲しい/want is an adjective, it can’t work with を. It’s literally something like “desirable”, the same way 好き/like would be “likeable” and is also paired with が.
バナナが好きだ - I like bananas

As for your reasonning with に, it’s a bit of an overkill and mainly shows that you need a refresher with basic usage of particles. Just go on with lessons and you’ll very soon get the point, again. :muscle:

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#3

が puts focus on the noun it’s marking, as you are selecting THAT noun specifically instead of any other noun. は is a little more neutral, it doesn’t select that noun specifically, just put it as the topic.

The translation “Are bananas what you want?”, which puts a lot of focus on the bananas, requires が. を is used exclusively (?) with verbs and に in this specific example, would also only be used if ほしい were a verb.

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#4

So one can tell it’s は/が because the sentence doesn’t have a verb?
Would something like「（あなたが）バナナを欲しがるか」be correct then?

Once it’s down to just は/が I can work out which is correct if I understand the context, but that still leaves me with the “direction” issue. If 欲しい means the subject wants then が goes on あなた, if 欲しい means the subject is wanted then the が goes on バナナ, but is this just a vocabulary issue? Does 欲しい always mean the latter and you have to know that as part of knowing the word or is there something else?

#5

I don’t know about the を欲しがる, it looks wrong but I can’t explain why. About the ほしい direction, I could explain, but this vtuber can do quite a better job than me (if you can tolerate her voice):

In short, Japanese can accept both directions without issues, and it tends to use the “bananas” as the subject instead of an object.

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#6

『バナナが欲しいですか。』 just, sounds right.

I can’t explain to you why, but it does. And I think that just comes from hours and hours of listening to content. If that’s not something you do I would suggest you do so. It’s done wonders for me in not having to reverse engineer sentences to the point that I’m trying to figure out the Dragonball Super timeline during the Goku Black Saga.

#7

Yes, bananas are indeed what I want :yum:

3 Likes
#8

The (not so easy) answer to this is that one (main) form of Japanese sentence is a subject/predicate sentence. The predicate either tells you what the subject is doing (a verb) or some description of the subject (adjectives/adjectivals). The subject is marked with が but can also be the topic, marked by は, and it is then assumed as the subject. Keep in mind は doesn’t mark the subject itself and in plenty of sentences in marks the object (marked by を in transitive sentences) or simply a topic that has no grammatical relevance to the predicate. So since 欲しい is an adjective and the banana is the thing being described by that adjective then it has to be the subject. This leaves は and が for you to choose between.

が is preferred here. The reasons why are not simple but some brief reasons (which are not hard rules) are: 欲しい expresses desire/preference and any prediacte expressing preference will take が over は unless there is a specific reason not to; 欲しい expresses judgement about the quality of something (as do basically all adjectives ending in しい due to their etymological construction) and there is a preference for が to be used with such adjectives; が simply sounds correct, you can construct some grammatical reasoning for why (“が emphasises the noun so it shows what I desire is important, not the desire itself” etc etc) but at the end of the day it is simply what people say, most of the time, so you also need to say it.

That is grammatically correct but it is not something you would say. Since it is a direct question to the person in question you do not need to use がる and in fact the usages of がる are fairly limited compared to そう・らしい・ように見える・みたい etc. Using がる would be like asking “You give off a strong impression (real or fake) of wanting bananas?”.

As a general rule even in so-called “double subject” sentences you will never ever ever repeat が and you simply mark the first “subject” with は. So あなたはバナナが欲しいですか is correct. I won’t expand on this as it gets a lot more complex. Please read this old (unfinished) comment of mine and feel free to read the whole thread in order to get some overview of は・が.

I have left a massive amount of detail out of this comment but hopefully that is enough broadstrokes for you to latch onto something which might prove helpful. If you want clarification on something then please ask. The basic thing you need to remember here though for N5 or N4 or whatever the level of this is is that the pattern is pretty much always NOUNが欲しい。You can actually kinda ignore everything I wrote and just get more input and you’ll gain an intuition for these things - of course if you find grammar interesting in itself (like me) then you can go deeper into explicit descriptions and explanations. Good luck!

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#9

We’ve all gone bananas here :banana:

1 Like
#10

Bananas are my favorite fruits!

#11

Okay, thanks for the help everyone. I think maybe I should ponder this specific case some more at a later date, maybe in a week or so, to see if things have become clearer to me once the dust has settled as it were.