I just stumbled upon this sentences for the 引き出す vocab entry:
教師の仕事とは、生徒の興味を引き出す事だ
Which Bunpro translates as:
A teacher’s job is to draw out the interest of his or her students.
While I can understand the Japanese sentence, I wonder what とは means here precisely. I parse it as a combination of と meaning “with” and then は as topic marker but I’m not sure what nuance と brings here or what would change if you just said 教師の仕事は、．．．
Thank you for you help!
Hi, indeed it is a curious combination.
This is what jisho.org has to say about it. I reckon the first usage would respond to your query.
HTH!
Oh so it would be a shortening for というのは, that would make a lot of sense in this context.
Japanese people do love their という…
Yeap! Pablo got it. That exactly what it is (a shortening of というのは).
Just a simple って can be used for the same meaning as well. In my personal experience とは is actually the most common form by far, especially in speech. 〇〇とは is a good Google search term as well when looking for a definition or explanation of something.