I recently finished making English subs for a 45 minute Japanese rock concert video from the 1980's.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNqfX9nm-No
Here I introduce a concept in subtitling whereby a subtitle template with dashed ("------") blanks appears for an entire English sentence, and the blanks convert to words and phrases as the corresponding concepts appear in the Japanese audio, in that order.
The viewer has a better idea of what is being sung at the moment it is sung, and which words are receiving the emotional emphasis in the song. Also, the revelation of meaning is delayed for the English viewer in the same way. The "kicker" phrase at the end of a verse or a meaning-altering particle (such as an entire sentence negation) isn't prematurely revealed in the translation.
I've watched it a bit and it seems very nicely done
Japanese verbs are "greater" than English verbs in the sense that you conjugate/suffixate a verb to express negation, conjunctions, conditional forms etc, making it longer and longer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_verb_conjugation
In contrast, English has a relatively simple set of inflections of verbs. Many of those Japanese verb forms and suffixated long verbs are translated into multi-word phrases. Compare:
Anata wa kyou nemuru. (You sleep today.) -- verb is in normal form ("nemuru")
Anata wa kinou nemurenakatta. (You were not able to sleep yesterday.) -- verb is in continuative form ("nemuru"→"nemu") + possibility suffix ("reru"→"re") + negation suffix ("nai"→"naka") + past suffix ("ta"→"tta")
Are there any major Japanese programming languages? It would seem to me that given our relatively primitive compilers, that 'analytic' languages offer simpler mediums for unambiguous programming, whereas 'synthetic' languages may bear greater nuance of expression when we can 'think' programs into existence in the future.
Words can be stressed in many different ways in an English sentence, and the pattern of stresses in a sentence determines much of the meaning in the surrounding context that isn't communicated by word inflections such as -s and -ed. In programming languages, this would be equivalent to marking up identifiers in different ways (using bolding, italicizing, underlining, etc) instead of using prefix, suffix, and circumfix syntax operators and punctuation.
What is the past tense form of 'shake'? 'see'? 'walk'? 'sleep'? 'eat'? 'speak'? 'sit'? 'seek'? 'work'?
There are no rules. You basically have to memorize every word and all the possible ways it can morph.
English possessive: 's or s' or ' or s, depending. Japanese possessive: no
English plural: different for every word. Japanese plural: same as singular, or throw on a -tachi
English past tense: different for every word. Japanese past tense: -mashita for verbs, deshita for adverbs/adjectives
In English, nothing is simple. In Japanese, a multi-word phrase may have more syllables, but at least it will always be the same rule.
ICHIRAN/DICT> (length (get-kana-forms 1547720))
186
Plurals! Oh, that's my favorite topic that I'm working on right now. -tachi is mostly used with people, so can't be used in most context. For inanimate objects you just say the number of them. And that's where the counters come in... At which point any sane person gives up learning Japanese for good.
Past tense, isn't that the same as conjugations? Also your rules don't really work. "tanoshii" => "tanoshiideshita"? Pretty sure that's not a word. The correct past tense is "tanoshikatta [desu]".
Can you conjugate the (regular) verb "へる" (heru)? There happen to be two verbs that are pronounced "heru" but with completely different conjugations! Do you remember which one is which? In fact any verb that ends with -eru or -aru can be potentially conjugated like an ichidan verb or a godan verb. For each such verb you have to remember its conjugation class, lest you conjugate it completely wrong. So these aren't so regular after all.
Also a related topic is intransitive/transitive verb pairs. These are also heavily irregular, and you must use the correct one in a sentence or it will be ungrammatical.
Surely that's the whole point of the "8020" in the URL?
Personally I thought it was excellent, compact, understandable introduction. Sure it leaves things out, but if it didn't it would be a textbook!
Neru tends to indicate more intentional sleep (arranging to go to sleep: deciding to retire to bed, to lie down etc), whereas nemuru is spontaneous sleep (falling asleep --- and not necessarily lying down).
"Nerarenakatta" has the possible interpretation of something like, "I couldn't sleep (because of no opportunity to get away from activity and lie down)" whereas "nemurenakatta" is "I couldn't fall asleep" (insomnia).
I think if you stayed up all night studying and so because of that you couldn't sleep, that's when you might best use "nerarenakatta". I couldn't sleep (because I needed to do something else with the time, not due to failure to fall asleep).
As far as languages go, Japanese is structured a lot like a programming language. If you learn five or six "bunpo" or grammar rules, you can go a very long ways. Then, to improve, just add rules to your mastery.
When I first learn any programming language I start with basics: variable binding/assignment, types, conditionals, looping, etc. Japanese fits very nicely into the same learning method.
Does a language have if/then? is it 'if (<expression>) { expression }'? Or 'if <expression> then <expression> end if'? Is there an 'unless' form? What about 'else'?
For Japanese, it's <expression> naraba <expression>. That's it. Unless? <expression> nakeriba <expression>.
How about while? <expression> nagara <expression>
For people who can learn the gist of a programming language in a week, you could learn the gist of Japanese in a week or two. That doesn't mean you would be fluent. You'd still need to learn thousands of vocabulary words. But the basic mechanics can be mastered in days or weeks. More mechanics can be layered as needed.
There are actually a number of ways to say "if" in japanese, and the one you mention can only be used in certain contexts.
People might get your gist if you use the conditional tense for everything, but you'll be wrong a lot. The -tara/nara grammar is at least as commonly used, if not more so.
I bring this up to illustrate only that the "programming language" metaphor doesn't go very far. Japanese, like any human language, is loaded with weird, illogical exceptions.
I bring this up to illustrate that the metaphor isn't perfect, but it has some legs. I meant that BNF diagrams would be easier to create and understand for Japanese than for English.
You are right that there are more forms for saying 'if'.
Then again, I've seen programmers who spell 'if' 'f-o-r'.
VERB (conjugated) + nara (or the ridiculously formal "naraba")
VERB (conjugated) + some noun, such as baai (case)
VERB (plain form) + to
VERB (izenkei form) + ba
VERB (past form) + ra
VERB (plain form) + to shitara
VERB (plain form) + to sureba
Each has a slightly different use and meaning of course, but it's still confusing enough for me even now.
It's as if you populate the parameters to a function by placing them in specific registers (using specific particles) and then execute the function (verb) once you're done.
I imagine this idea breaks down horribly once multiple verbs are introduced to a single sentence...
"Sen"... no. The closest is that present-tense polite (teineigo) forms of verbs change from -masu to -masen to make them negative. However, that's basically the only case that rule works. You also often end up changing the rest of the sentence, just like in English or other languages. For example, in English, indefinite pronouns will generally change when you negate, as the negative of "somebody is here" is "nobody is here", not "somebody is not here". And of course, being a natural language, it's full of exceptions (like how "everyone" doesn't follow the pattern of "everything", "every time", etc.)
I'm not a native Japanese speaker, but I'm pretty sure that "hito" is only used to refer to other people, never to oneself (source: the excellent "Nihongo Notes" series by the Mizutanis).
Maybe watashi ha ningen desu 私は人間です (I am a human) would be a better example that still illustrates the grammar pattern.
Construct-Sentence -subject Taro -object Noriko -verb to_see -time Past
> "Taro saw Noriko."
Construct-Sentence -object Noriko -time Past -verb to_see -subject Taro
> "Taro saw Noriko."
Construct-Sentence -wa Taro -wo Noriko -verb masu -time Past
> "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita."
csent wa:Taro wo:Noriko masu -past_affirmative
# "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita."
Construct-Sentence Taro Norkio to_see Past
> "Taro saw Noriko"
Construct-Sentence Norkio Taro to_see Past
> "Noriko saw Taro"
Construct-Sentence Taro to_see Norkio Past
> "Taro Noriko'ed see" miru --topic=Taro --object=Noriko # Taro sees Noriko
formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object="Noriko")
# Taro wa Noriko wo mimashita
formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object=kiru(object="doresu", "Noriko"))
# Taro wa doresu wo kiru Noriko wo mimashita ??
formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object=kiru(object="doresu")("Noriko"))
# Taro wa doresu wo kiru Noriko wo mimashita "Taro saw (Noriko wears a dress)."
formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object="Noriko")
"Taro saw Noriko."
formal(present(kiru))(topic="Noriko", object="doresu")
"Noriko wears a dress."
formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object=(formal(present(kiru))(topic="Noriko", object="doresu")) )
"Taro saw (Noriko wears a dress)."
"Taro saw Noriko wear a dress."
"Taro wa (doresu wo kiru Noriko wa(?)) wo mimashita"
"Taro wa doresu wo kiru Noriko wo mimashita"
*Please help correct any errors, as I have never formally studied the Japanese language.
If you would like more of this kind of thing, I highly recommend Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar. It's a lot like OP's article, but much more thorough, organized by topic, and provides auxillary resources so you can dig in as much as you please.
It was always my assumption that grammar is the most important thing to learn about a language. Vocabulary accumulates almost automatically over time, with practise (and a dictionary). Interesting to see how that holds in this case.
I have ideas for how to improve things and wouldn't mind brainstorming things together with the author of that's something they're interested in.
TL;DR: knowledge about language is different from skill of communicating in language.
I think it depends on what your goals are. If you just want to communicate, vocabulary is the most important thing to get started, since even with poor grammar people can infer what you mean (gestures help too!). I've seen too many people here in Japan who have crammed English grammar all their school years but are paralyzed when trying to communicate because they're just focused on getting the grammar right.
Obviously, * Desu/deshita/de arimasen/de arimasen deshita * Masu/masen/mashita/masen deshita
Then add a few more * if * while * want to <verb> * passive * honorific * etc.
You can learn one a week or one a month. There aren't very many to learn. But having just four or five up your sleeve (in addition to verb conjugation) can really improve your comfort.
I've been in Tokyo now 18 months, took private lessons twice costing about $2,000, and feel I learned 10 words. That's $200/word. I joke with people I stopped taking lessons because learning Kanji would bankrupt me. Japanese just doesn't stick in my older and very Western brain. It doesn't help that my office does business in English and one can get by in Tokyo with minimal Japanese and a lot of pointing and gesturing. The glacial progress becomes discouraging.
I tried Rosetta Stone. It takes the same phrasebook approach as the first textbook I was given, Nihongo Fun & Easy, which was neither. The textbook at least had short sidebar discussions of grammar and somewhat useful phrases. I had no idea where I'd get to use the phrase "The children are swimming," that Rosetta offers.
The 8020 article was the first discussion of particles that actually made sense. When I'd asked teachers about particles before the answer was usually something like "Don't worry about that yet, just memorize the phrases." If the remainder of the book is in the same vein I'd pay twice the asking price. I flipped through parts of Nihongo Fun & Easy after reading this article and it suddenly made much more sense. I wasn't staring at a list of phrases I was supposed to memorize and slowly reverse engineer the language, but could deconstruct the basic sentences.
It's much easier for me to learn construction, and use the break down of other sentences to construct my own, even if the rules fail sometimes and lead me to construct sentences no native speaker would utter. That's the other 80% of language idiosyncrasies that takes time.
I don't expect to be fluent in Japanese any time soon, however moving past "sumimasen kore onegeihshimasu" while pointing at a menu item would be awesome.
For learning Kanji, the most efficient option I've found is Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig. It's a bit of a long-term investment, in that it takes a while for them to really pay off (you don't learn the readings/sounds until book two, the first one is completely focused on the meaning and writing of the characters), but in the long run I think it's a much better option than for example the books trying to teach you the characters by showing you their similarity to the things the represent.
In a nutshell, with TPR the teacher gives the student a command in the target language, demonstrates the action the command is asking for, repeats the command and finally the student copies the action.
For example, if English was the target language, the teacher could say "sit down", then sit down themselves, then once again say "sit down" and the student would copy the action by sitting down.
This can then be repeated for "stand up", for "pick up the fork", or any arbitrarily complex and sophisticated command.
As you've no doubt noticed, the commands are given in grammatically correct sentences, in context. Grammar is not explicitly taught, however. It is implicitly taught and implicitly learned.
What makes this method work really well is that when you learn words and grammar, you're not doing it with just your mind and maybe some visual cues, you're using your body and doing so in a specific physical context (the place where you're learning), associating what you're learning with parts of that place. It's somewhat analogous to using a memory palace to learn, only without any extra effort of constructing the palace or imaging placing things you want to learn there. With TPR you actually physically interact with the things you learn in that space.
Another great thing is that a TPR teacher need not have any special training in education or really even in the method. TPR takes maybe a minute or two to explain to anyone, so you can recruit helpers from any friends or acquaintances you have who know the target language and are willing to help, though if you want consistent lessons and dedication you'll probably want a professional tutor or teacher anyway.
TPR focuses on learning to understand, in emulation of the first step of a child's language learning process. Children first learn to understand, then to speak, then to read, and finally to write. TPR helps with the first part.
When I taught my tutor this method, he told me that I was by far the fastest of his students to pick up vocabulary, and he wound up switching completely to teaching with this method. It was really effective for me, and I highly recommend it.
TPR has its limits, and it can't be used for all aspects of language learning, but it's fantastic for getting your language learning bootstrapped really quickly.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_physical_response
[2] - http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH01da.di...
[3] - http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH0162.di...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Information_eXchange
The article doesn't mention subclauses at all, but it's where things become hairy. There's particle "ga" which is similar to "wa" except it works as a subject of subclause, except sometimes it means "but". There are dozens of ways to incorporate subclauses into main sentence, using different particles. It's very common for the entire sentence to be a subclause ([something] no/n desu).
I've personally been happy with the following books as well: Bungo Manual: Selected Reference Materials for Students of Classical Japanese Classical Japanese Reader and Essential Dictionary Classical Japanese: A Grammar
Many of the confusing rules we have today (i-adjectives vs na-adjectives, different verb conjugation classes, etc.) are subsets of much larger rule-sets from early in the language's written history. Bound particles are probably the most confusing of these rules, which were too convoluted to survive over time, but still inform common usage patterns today.
The Japanese language (particularly its written form) is very young, so it's actually feasible to gain an in-depth understanding of the language's entire history without spending a decade on a doctorate.
The "-um-" affix in "kumakain" makes the verb active ("is eating"). If we instead used the "-in-" affix (as in "kinakain"), it would make the verb passive ("is being eaten by"). So we could alternatively say: "Kinakain ng pusa ang isda" to mean: "The fish is being eaten by the cat".
Small side comment, if anyone's learning Japanese and wants to ask or answer questions about it, you're welcome to join a little Discord chat group (including native speakers and advanced learners) at https://discord.gg/6sjr3UY
This is VERY rough and informal though, and not Japan being very polite, it's not something that I'd hear everyday. Maybe on TV or from really close friends, and even then I'm not sure if everyone would say that.
But it just goes to show that natural languages are very complex creatures, and even the tidiest rules have exceptions sometimes.
The "noun-cases" or कारक (karaka) are generally equivalent to the "particles" in Japanese. The genitive (eqv. の) is not a karaka, since it has no relation to the verb. Of course, since there is technically no syntactic difference between adjectives and nouns in Sanskrit, the semantics of the genitive in particular can be very undeterministic. This is not the case in others though.
I wish there were more studies on how Indic traditions affected East/SE Asia [3]. Sadly, most academics/people here don't believe there exists a world outside N. America & W.Europe (often no India either!).
[1] There is a competing tradition of semantics called "Nyaya" where sentences are seen to be Noun-centric. These discourses are generally not easily accessible.
[2] Dividing the languages based on presence/absence of noun inflections would appear not to have much discriminative power to claim anything about historical origins. Historical Linguistics, I believe, is mostly a politicized pseudoscience.
[3] This documentary highlights the kind of things I mean.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WaenzbSJwk
It is also fascinating to look at the Thai/Khmer scripts and realize these are related to current day Telugu/Kannada scripts.
But will all of those variants still be considered the "same" sentence? I'm asking because it's popular to make the same claim about Hungarian, but it's not really true. You can switch things around a lot and still get fully grammatical sentences that all relate to the same event. But due to Hungarian's topic/focus structure, the actual meanings expressed by the variants are so different that Hungarian speakers wouldn't consider them "the same sentence expressed a bit differently". Some examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_grammar#Emphasis
In contrast, I believe Latin is really liberal in its sentence structure, especially in poetry.
There are actually only 7 kinds of सुप्s (x 3 numbers); there are about 10 तिङ्s, but only about 3-4 are in general usage. Then there are other sentence transformations outside these.
The relational modifiers "stick" to the roots, so moving words around the sentence is quite easy - this is particularly useful to poets who need to satisfy certain mathematical rules in their compositions. Much of this is also true for languages like Kannada/Hindi. There was also a paper about a KR scheme inspired by something of this kind.
Sanskrit is generally easy to pick up with the right teachers, in an immersive environment; the grammar-technique, esp. in a "sterile" environment, is rather terrible IMO.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your point, Hindi's sambandh kaarak (ka-ke-ki-ra-re-ri-na-ne-ni) is the genitive case. watashi no hon <-> meri pustak, etc
I've been married to a native Japanese for going on 19 years now.
I have tried to learn the language. I have lived in Japan for 6 years, hoping that full immersion would help. I even embarked in the Kumon Japanese course whilst in Japan, from beginner level to more advanced. I have piles and piles of the work books cluttering my home.
I ended up being able to read katakana, hiragana, and learned some 250 Kanji.
What I didn't end up managing was being able to have decent conversation in Japanese. Sure, I could ask for a beer, directions, talk about the weather, but that was about it. I had reached some plateau and could go no further.
In the end I gave up. It was basically something I couldn't do. I tried many different ways of learning, found none which could not prevent my sheer frustration at not being able to take the knowledge in.
Are some people simply 'wired' to learn language more than others? Is there an age limit, for example? Was it my low tolerance for frustration? Was it my perfectionist tendencies? Probably a 'yes' to most of those.
But I stopped after more than a decade of trying.
Which part of the sentence is the direct object? Uh... the part with the direct object tag hanging off it? Correct!
Have you ever heard a programming language described as "designed for teaching"? Japanese is a language designed to be as simple as possible to learn.
Coming from English, the idea that a natural language could actually be designed was a shock to me. I thought they just evolved sloppily and haphazardly. Well, Japanese is proof that it doesn't have to be that way. Clear rules and not too many of them. No exceptions. Rigidly consistent. It's like a language created in a lab that never got dirtied up by real world usage. Except, oh wait, it's a real language used by millions of people every day.
Putting aside that the norm in Japanese school is rote memorization and pedantic attention to details (e.g. you'd memorize dates of historical events), the Japanese grammar that is taught in class is traditional Japanese grammar. It's pretty streamlined compared to the abomination that is medieval Latin grammar (which remains the basis for English grammar taught in class), but it still targets Classical Japanese and uses rather obscure terms where clear diagrams would suffice.
I'll have to ask, but I think that instead of diagrams, Japanese students mainly need to memorize the difference between Izenkei, Mizenkei, Renyoukei, Rentaikei and Shuushikei, even though the last one is irrelevant for modern Japanese.
And of course Japanese wasn't "designed" any more than English was. There are dialects with widely varying grammar and vocabulary, and there some aspects which are very hard to learn even if you ignore the writing system (e.g. the proper use of Wa vs Ga, the proper use of emphatic sentence endings like no/n'da or yo). Inflection is way more regular than English, and syntax is pretty streamlined, which is a boon.
The trick for wa/ga is often just to remember that subjects are often implied in Japanese and missing from the actual text/speech. So, "Nekko ga suki desu" because the "watakushi wa" was implied.
For sure, Japanese verbs are more regular than English verbs. But most materials written about Japanese are aimed squarely at beginners. They naturally skip over any foibles for pedagogical reasons. There isn't all that much written (in English) about tricky sentences, syntactic ambiguity and similar mistakes.
By comparison, Japanese might have simpler syntax and phonology than English, but higher orthographic and morphological complexity (and English is already orthographically complex).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit
We had it in school in grades 8-10 or so and I really enjoyed learning it. The grammar rules are fairly simple and there are not many of them, IIRC. Words can be made up out of smaller words by joining them together by simple rules.
Another interesting thing is that many words have multiple meanings, a fact that poet and prose writes in the Sanskrit literature leveraged heavily. So a passage of text can have multiple layers of meaning.
It is almost like a programming language where you compose bigger structures such as functions and classes out of the atomic elements of the language.
Perhaps the Japanese grammar was designed by a small group of individuals, maybe even one individual, a long time ago, and promoted officially by the Japanese Emperor of the time. Many writing systems have been designed from scratch in the past. Many spoken languages have risen from regional dialect to imperial language, and at least one language, Israeli, was brought to life after being dead as a spoken language for centuries. No-one's ever found a definitive link between Japanese and any other language. Perhaps at some time, the Japanese grammar was designed from scratch, perhaps using a mixture of vocabulary from many other nearby languages existing at that time, and promulgated to become the language of all Japan.
Meanwhile over in Korean, the writing system was designed from scratch to be very simple (I'm led to believe - I don't know any Korean)
Then, just to mess with people, optionally throw in thousands of Chinese characters.
> What this means is that the sentences, “This is a car”, and, “This is the car”, would both be, 「これは車です」. There is no differentiation.
This is not always true. The latter could be 「これが車です」. The は and が particles are very similar but are still different. Fully grasping this small difference is one of the biggest problems Japanese learners encounter when studying grammar.
Closer to the beginning, the article also mentions:
> The topic of a Japanese sentence is very similar to what other languages refer to as the subject. The subject of a sentence is the person or thing that does the action described by the main verb in the sentence. These are, in fact, slightly different concepts, but for now, we will treat them as being the same so as to keep things simple.
It turns out that は marks the topic and が marks the subject. I feel that many times the confusion between は and が in Japanese learners happens because the learning material tries to make this simplification in the beginning. When it's time to learn が, it's hard to retrain the brain.
* example that glosses over the difference between a topic and a subject is frustrating because, in fact, the similarity is fairly superficial.
* there is no "a", "an", or "the" in Japanese, however to specify "this is the car" (implying that it is in answer to some question about which car) one would say これが車です。Using the が particle instead of は.
I'm always on the lookout for useful resources. So far, Tae Kim's guide [1] has been the best I've found. Kim doesn't assume much about the reader's pre-existing knowledge yet he is able to remain succinct.
Try to imagine the kind of snarks you could do if you could put things like "I don't reckon" on hold until the end of the sentence.
Sadly (ironically?), that tends not to be the kind of language subtlety/humor the Japanese go for.
If that's true, I think it might be more that such kind of humor is seen as too basic, or childish, and not particularly subtle for adults. Akin to simple puns or "ghost jokes" and the like in English (What do ghosts like for dessert? I Scream!) that kids — or foreigners — may enjoy, but native speakers don't really count as witty.
You can still see what you're talking about in some of their comedy skits, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nW4jhqPbd0
And in fact the Japanese negation at the end - negation suffix ("nai"→"naka") - from whym's comment in this thread - sounds like the Marathi one - same sound (naka or nako).
Thanks to this article, I've come to understand particles much better and why they're important, but does it change in casual spoken Japanese? Are some particles okay to drop whereas others are kept? Thanks in advance.
Sure. "piza wo taberu?" can be "piza taberu?" and that's fine, even normal.
> (including pronouns)
This is different and I think there are a few misconceptions bundled up in this assumption.
1. Particles don't exist on their own; they're permanently linked to the word that precedes them; if you've ever studied a Romance language, you can think of them as a way of declining nouns.
So "watashi wa" is the nominative, "watashi wo" is the accusative.
2. Pronoun dropping is done in the sense that the pronoun is not essential to the sentence and can be inferred from context.
For example, if you and your friend are eating and you ask "motto taberu [gonna eat more?]," nobody's going to be confused about whether the subject of that sentence is "watashi wa" or "anata wa."
It happens in English, too, but people overthink it a lot when presented with it consciously in Japanese.
John went to the shop. John bought a cake. John took it to Bill's house. John and Bill ate the cake.
It's not grammatically wrong, but it's clunky. We just use pronouns to sound 'normal' in English:
John went to the shop. He bought a cake. He took it to Bill's house. They ate the cake.
In Japanese instead of changing a noun (John) to a pronoun (he) you just don't say the subject if it hasn't changed:
John went to the shop, bought a cake and took it to Bill's house. They ate the cake.
Which, as you can see, is something that works in English at times too.
Tarō wa Noriko wo toshokan de mimashita.
In casual spoken Japanese, can any of these particles (wa, wo, de) be dropped?
Japanese is a so-called "pro-drop" language, which means it's normal to omit pronouns completely when they can be inferred. "Watashi wa tabemasu" would only be used for specific emphasis, as in: "I specifically (as opposed to somebody else you were just talking about) am eating." In any other context, it sounds unnatural, and you would just say "tabemasu" even in formal situations.
Separately, you can omit particles in colloquial speech when they're obvious. So for instance, in a polite setting you might ask "ashita wa, nani wo shimasu ka?" (meaning "what are you doing tomorrow?") But in a casual environment, you could say "ashita, nani suru?" and still be understood perfectly.
Watashi wa tabamasu. -> As for me, I'm eating.
Tabemasu. -> I'm eating.
It bears repeating: this depends on context. But you can see how "watashi wa" sticks out like a sore thumb, and you can instantly recognize novice Japanese second-language speakers because they say "watashi wa" all the time. And you'll later learn that "watashi" is sometimes an inappropriate way to refer to yourself...
I shouldn't say that the language relies on inference. Rather, speakers of Japanese rely on inference. It's like chaining functions in some languages.
Car.rent().driveTo(work).park().driveTo(lunch).wash().
By the time you get to the washing in the conversation, the car is hard to find in the sentence, and the driver never does appear. But they are both there if you go looking.
eg: Taberu (eat) or Hayai (fast)
It sounds like cavemen talk if you translate it literally, but it is perfectly valid japanese
Tarou wa Noriko wo toshokan de mimashita. (Tarou saw Noriko at the library.)
Tarou wa Noriko wo mimashita. (Tarou saw Noriko.)
Tarou wa Noriko wo mimashita toshokan (The library where Tarou saw Noriko)
Generally "<sentence> <noun>" means "the <noun> such that <noun> <particle> <sentence> is true for some choice of <particle>".
Tarou ga Noriko wo mita toshokan
The particle "ga" and "wa" both introduce a topic. But in a phrase to explain a noun, we use "ga" exclusively. Your main point still holds, in a sense that "Tarou ga Noriko wo mita" is a valid sentence. But to be precise, "mita" in those two sentences are different conjugated forms; it just happens that two conjugated forms are the same in the verb "miru" (to see).
Forgive me for saying this, since you seem to be a native speaker, but don't you mean that they both introduce the subject, not topic (using 'topic' as a linguistic term)?
"Wa" would be the topicalising subject marker, denoting known information:
Tanaka wa nihon ni itta.
Tanaka went to Japan. -> As for Tanaka, he went to Japan. Tanaka = known information (i.e. Tanaka is familiar to the listener)
"Ga", while also a subject marker could denote/introduce new information:
Tanaka ga nihon ni itta.
Tanaka went to Japan. -> e.g. It was Tanaka who went to Japan.
Tanaka = new information (e.g. the listener is did not not Tanaka was the one going to Japan.)
(Note: I realise there are other constructions for my interpretation of the ga-sentence)
"anata ga kukkii wo taberu no wo mita yo" (I saw you eat the cookie)
"Anata" is now the subject of a subordinate clause.
I think it can be topicalized (in the sense of becoming the grammatical topic, marked by ha) like this:
"Anata ha, kukkii wo taberu no wo mita yo". (As for you, I saw (you) eat the cookie.)
The subordinate clause now has an unspecified/implicit subject, and that identifies with the topic that was introduced.
I think an extraposition of "anata" (into a non-topical position) is possible like this, where subordinate clause minus its subject is now the topic:
"kukkii wo taberu no wo mita ha, anata da yo". (the one I saw eating the cookie is you)
Of course, generally speaking I am learning Japanese.