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I'm attempting to practice my writing and tried writing this in Japanese

> Because its cold outside I went to eat Pho with a friend.

Originally I wrote

> 寒い外なので僕 **は** 友達とフォーを食べに行きました。

I was then given multiple corrections by native speakers.

Person A and Person B both wrote

> 外 **は** 寒いので僕 **は** 友達とフォーを食べに行きました。

Person C wrote

> 外 **が** 寒いので僕 **は** 友達とフォーを食べに行きました。

Looking at these corrections the Person A and Person B one doesn't make sense
to me. I don't understand why は is used twice in this case.

From what I understand, double は is used for comparisons. Where the first は is
the "topic marker", so in this case outside (外), and the second は marks I (僕)
which is where the comparison comes in.

But using this "comparison grammar" this way seems really odd to me because
now I read the Person A and Person B correction as

> Because its cold outside I went to eat Pho with a friend opposed to other
> people in the world who may have not done this.

This seems very wrong to me. So what am I missing here / not understanding
here?
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2020-02-16T03:25:11.290
74430
2021-11-17T14:08:09.733
2021-11-17T14:08:09.733
30339
question
grammar particles particle-は
Confusion about double は in correction
This may be disappointing to hear, but there's no major difference between
外は寒いので(…) and 外が(…) unless you imagine peculiar situations. (That's why native
speakers produced both of those sentences.)

Why is that? That's because using vs not using は heavily depends on context.

> From what I understand, double は is used for comparisons. Where the first は
> is the "topic marker", so in this case outside (外), and the second は marks I
> (僕) which is where the comparison comes in.

There's no such rule. Each は is interpreted accordingly given its own context.

For example, if you said the example sentence after saying something about how
you were outside, it would be natural that you continue with 外は(…) because
it's shared/known information; otherwise you'd use 外が.

However, you could still use は with virtually no pretense **in this case.**
There are a couple of potential reasons for this. For one, since you are
talking about going to another place, **there's a sign of a potential switch
of topic** , even if the sense of contrast is not so strong as to imply that
something is not the case with another topic. Secondly, words like 外 that
stand for places simply tend to be topicalized naturally, due to implicitly
being in the discourse.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-02-17T23:11:31.023
74470
2020-02-18T03:02:08.603
2020-02-18T03:02:08.603
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answer