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Today while I was self studying my Japanese textbook, I noticed this sentence
which was translated roughly from "today I am returning to japan"

**わたしは 今日 日本 に かえります。**

This seemed a bit odd to me since it didn't really sound that great following
up 今日 with 日本 as there was no particle in between them.

So I was wondering if these sentences I came up with would make more
sense/would be more commonly used

formal: **今日は わたしが 日本 に かえります。**

casual: **今日は 日本 に かえります。**

If there are any better ways to say this then please let me know, I'm a
beginner so my Kanji vocabulary is next to nothing so answering in mostly
Hiragana would be appreciated. Thanks
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2020-01-30T05:00:31.110
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2020-01-31T08:38:51.683
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question
grammar particles adverbs
Question about grammar, how to say "today I am returning to japan"
わたしは今日, 日本にかえります is natural and best, if you don't want to mean any other
nuance.

は is used as a topic marker, emphasize and contrast. so I feel 今日は日本にかえります
focuses "today", which is the day you return to Japan.

In Japanese language, the first person is often omitted, so I feel
今日はわたしが日本にかえります focus "I", which is the person who returns to Japan today.
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2020-01-30T12:43:43.557
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> わたしは今日、日本にかえります。

This is actually the most natural (or perhaps I should say neutral) word order
and topic marking here. It’s common in speech to place a slight pause after 今日
(represented by a comma here).

The reason for this is because it’s most natural for the subject of the
predicate to become the sentence topic in Japanese. This is what happens by
default, and as a result it doesn’t add any layer of extra nuance or
markedness.

You _can_ mark other things in the sentence as a topic, such as the indirect
object (日本 here), time adjuncts (今日, 今{いま}, 明日{あした}, etc.), objects (no
example available from this sentence), but this goes _against_ the default,
which means there is some _reason_ for doing so in terms of how you are trying
to structure the information.

The basic function of a non-default usage of は is to pick something out of the
discourse and make a comment specifically about it (and not other things).

So if you said 「今日は日本にかえります」, then that would only be natural if someone had
either already brought up “today” (e.g., by asking you what you’re doing
today) or you are for some reason bringing it up yourself (e.g., to contrast
with what you’re doing tomorrow, or to give it a sense of ‘at long last’ by
contrasting it with all the days up to this point).

If you said 「日本には今日かえります」 without someone else having already brought up 日本,
it’d be a little odd, because you can normally only かえる to one place anyways,
so there is no need to emphasize that you are not かえるing to some other place
also. But following a question of 「日本にはいつかえるのですか？」 (which itself would only be
a natural question if there is some reason to believe they are already
determined to go back to Japan), it would work (though in almost all cases you
would just say 「今日です」 or 「今日かえります」 to be more succinct).
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2020-01-30T16:20:48.060
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You can also say 今日、わたしは日本にかえります。Either way, は should not come directly after
今日 because that would alter the meaning.
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answer