86944
I was working on Duolingo and there is this sentence: My favourite food is
sushi. I put down:

> 寿司は私の好物です,

thinking "My favourite food is sushi" is essentially the same as "Sushi is my
favourite food". Correct? It turns out that the correct answer is:

> 私の好物は寿司です

My question is, do the two sentences mean the same thing? Or is there some
nuance I am missing somehow? My understanding is that the noun phrases before
and after は are switchable without changing the basic meaning of the sentence.
Am I correct? Or is that an over-generalisation?
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2021-06-04T03:26:17.253
86943
2021-06-05T12:02:39.723
2021-06-04T07:22:10.470
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question
particle-は
Noun phrases before and after は
Let's think about this simpler example:

  * これは私の車です。 This is my car.
  * 私の車はこれです。 My car is this.

Are these English sentences used interchangeably? No. The former is natural as
a response to "What's this?", whereas the latter is natural as a response to
"Where/Which is your car?"

Likewise, the two Japanese sentences you listed are different although the
basic information they convey is the same. The difference is the same as the
difference between "My favorite food is sushi" and "Sushi is my favorite food"
in English. The phrase before は is the **topic** , or what you're trying to
talk about, and it is often omitted. For example, when you happened to pass by
a sushi restaurant while discussing what to have for lunch, I believe it's
more natural to say "Sushi is my favorite food", because the topic of the
conversation is sushi, not someone's favorite food.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-06-04T05:44:10.027
86944
2021-06-05T12:02:39.723
2021-06-05T12:02:39.723
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86943
answer