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I know that there is no "The" particle in Japanese. But I am curious if there
is a proper way to emphasize a topic the same way you do with "The" in
English.

For example:

> He's "the man".
>
> So you meet the "president"!?!
>
> "The 2011" world champion?

Would translate to "だ!" as in "です"? How do you emphasize it in Japanese?

On the other hand how about translating book titles with "The" would be a
different question too.
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2012-03-13T05:15:16.917
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particles
How do you emphasize a word similar to using "The" in English
You could always try using endings like this:

> 〜じゃん (ex: イケメンじゃん！)  
>  〜ぞ (ex: イケメンだぞ！)  
>  〜だ (ex: イケメンだ！)

They provide at least some emphasis... though, it's not quite the same as in
English. Using だ just by itself can even work... as long as the vocal emphasis
is placed somewhere near だ.
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2012-03-13T05:25:09.137
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There is no syntactic counterpart to `the` in Japanese. Among world's
languages, there are languages that do have articles and languages that do
not. English and Japanese belong to the former and the latter respectively.
This is a fundamental difference, and you just cannot map an article from one
language to another language that does not have it.

Since this website is biased towards programmers, to give a close counterpart
to the two types of natural languages in programming languages, natural
languages with articles like English correspond to class-based object oriented
programming languages like C++, Java, Ruby. Natural languages without articles
like Japanese correspond to prototype-based object oriented programming
languages like Javascript. And as you may be able to guess, articles in
natural languages correspond to constructors in programming languages.

But it you want to express a similar nuance using different syntactic
components, then you can use expressions like `その`, `唯一の`, `先ほどの`, `例の`,
`問題の`,`問題になっている`, `話題になっている` depending on the context.
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2012-03-13T05:58:55.640
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2012-03-13T06:10:37.700
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Maybe [`本物{ほんもの}の～`](http://eow.alc.co.jp/%E6%9C%AC%E7%89%A9%E3%81%AE/UTF-8/)
"the real deal..."?

>   * かれは **本物の** 男だ。  
>  He's a _fair dinkum_ man.  
>  (might even be able to use `漢{おとこ}` in place of `男`.)
>
>   * **本物の** 首相に会いたいの？  
>  You want to meet with the _actual_ president?
>
>   * **本物の** 2011年チャンピオンなのか？  
>  The _real deal_ 2011 champion?
>
>
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2012-03-13T06:02:06.853
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本物may be a little informal. そのものwould be a more formal emphasis word:

  * そしてその勢いで1912年には民主党推薦の大統領に、続いて1913年の3月に大統領そのものにも就任していた
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