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How to differentiate between 'a' and 'the'.

> 私は魚を食べた

Does the above specify the exact fish that I ate or a general fish. Either
ways how would you say ...

>   1. ate a fish
>   2. ate the fish.
>
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grammar
How to differentiate between 'a' and 'the'
Japanese will not distinguish nouns like English does. `A` and `The` are both
English particles that _do not exist in Japanese_. If you are looking for a
linear translation, you won't find it.

In both cases, I would translate it as:

> 私は魚を食べた。

If I were to talk about a specific fish, then I would add more information to
let the listener know what fish I ate. For example:

> 冷蔵庫にある魚を食べた。  
>  I ate the fish that was in the fridge.
>
> その魚を食べた。  
>  I ate that fish.

As you study more Japanese, you will realize that particles in English and
Japanese rarely line up, as is the case with the two you are asking about in
this question.
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> 私は魚を食べた。

means both "I ate **the** fish" and "I ate **a** fish".

The two meanings are distinguished by the context of the conversation. If
someone came up to you and said (in English) "I ate the fish", you'd think
"Uh! What fish? What are you talking about?" The only time this sentence would
make any sense is if you'd already established the context e.g. you were
discussing what you chose from a menu, or someone asked you why the fridge
looks empty etc.

Japanese is a highly context dependent language. Sentences such as the above
cannot be translated accurately on their own. The more you study, the more
you'll come to understand this.
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2018-07-05T21:35:59.283
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Japanese does this very differently than English does.

English marks a distinction between _definite_ nouns (with 'the') and
_indefinite_ nouns (with 'a'). 'Definite' means several things, but primarily,
it means that the hearer should be able to identify the noun without further
explanation. Sometimes, it's because there's not more than one choice - 'the
Eiffel Tower' is identifiable with no context at all, because there's only one
of it. More often, it's because the noun in question has been mentioned
before. If you say 'A man was walking along a street. The man was tall.', it's
clear which man is tall - the one you already were talking about.

What's relevant for this discussion is the concept of 'the one you already
were talking about', specifically in contrast to what you're now saying about
it. This is called the _topic_. English uses definiteness alongside several
other strategies for marking things as the topic (including making them the
subject); it doesn't have a mechanism for directly marking the topic as topic.

Japanese does - it's は. は marks topics directly, and thus, it's used to mark
what you're saying something about. In your above example, you're saying
something about yourself - '(I am in this situation and) I ate the/a/Ø fish'.
Typically, if you want to say something about a topic, the topic will have
already been introduced somehow, or will be obvious from context (in this
case, clearly, you are accessible because you're present and having this
conversation). Nonetheless, it's not the same thing as definiteness, even if
at times it lines up.

If you want to make the fish definite, you can try making it the topic - you
mark it with は, and you get 魚は私が食べた. This is a bit different from what you're
going for, though, because in Japanese, making the subject _not_ the topic
typically makes it a focus. 魚は私が食べた sounds like ' _I_ ate the fish (and not
someone else)'. There's no way to make an object a topic without some other
unintended side effects. The object here isn't really specified for anything
like English definiteness, and thus, if you want to figure out whether it
would be definite or not if it was translated to English, you have to use
context.

As you can see, Japanese and English really don't line up. You can't
differentiate between 'a' and 'the' because the distinction Japanese makes is
rather different. Japanese cares about 'topic' and 'focus'. At times, English
uses definiteness to signal topicality, and at times, Japanese uses topicality
to signal something like definiteness. Nonetheless, these distinctions aren't
parallel to each other, and you can't rely on English translations to
understand how Japanese does this.
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