Grammar post #1: Subject and object indication

After watching lots of Tokyo Ghoul studying hard, here's another post at last. I decided to first look into subject and object markers in order to make better sense of sentences. Let's begin:

• が (ga) = Subject marker
• を (spelled "wo", pronounced "o") = Object marker

Here's a quick example to show what's what: 

The dog         ate          a bone.         

(Subject)                     (object)                         

I'll be using an example from the folks over at www.japaneseprofessor.com to clarify how these topic markers are used in Japanese. 

こどもが	テレビを	みた。
Kodomo ga	terebi o	mita.
Child (subj)	TV (obj)	watched.

"(The) child watched TV."

 In the table above, you can see that "child" followed by the marker "ga" indicates that the child is the subject of the sentence. What is the child watching? TV! Tv is the object of the sentence, and we can tell because it's followed by the marker "o". 

Now, the funny part is that we can change the order of the words that come before the verb (in this case, "mita"), and the sentence will still have the same meaning. This is shown below: 

テレビを	こどもが	みた。
Terebi o	kodomo ga	mita.
TV (obj)	child (subj)	watched.

We still know that it's the child who watched the TV, simply because of the markers that follow the words. The English equivalent of this sentence would be "(the) TV (is) watched (by the) child". What is the child watching? TV, just as in the last example. 

That's it for this post, in the next grammar post I'll continue with topic indication. Again, credit goes to www.japaneseprofessor.com for explaining this topic. What you see here is basically my abridged version of their work. :)
またね！(later!)