掲示板 Forums - Really confused with these sentences how they change with をplacement.

The direct object in a sentence is what the verb is acting on. In English, its usually after the verb. In japanese it's marked with 'wo'. As for the order, japanese is much more flexible than English. So the example sentence reversing the ga and wo didn't change the meaning.

Watashi ga ringo wo taberu

Ringo ga watashi wo taberu

you could do it like that as well.

Something that might make the idea of a direct object clearer is to look at verbs that can't have one, namely intransitives.

Put simply, the subject does the action and the direct object is acted upon (unlike other objects, which can be what the action is carried out through , or for, or which show how exactly it's carried out etc.). That poor apple, realistically, can only be the object, the one being eaten. If it was the subject, the one who did the eating, now that would be scary.

But some verbs are intransitive, they don't act on something, they just happen. "I told a joke and he laughed." What did I tell? A joke. That's the direct object. But what did he laugh? Huh? What do you mean, what? He just laughed. He couldn't have laughed a wall, or a bird, or a conference. (He could have laughed at them, sure, but those are not direct objects, their relation to the verb is not that close.)

Now for Japanese:

If we're playing hide-and-seek, it matters if I (subject) see you (object), so I win, or you (subject) see me (object), so you win. In English, the subject will come before the verb and the direct object will come after. There's no need for particles, their place shows us their role. Japanese is more flexible as to where parts of the sentence can sit, so it needs particles (placed after the part) to show us what role they have. If I (私) see you (君), there will be a が after 私 to show I'm the one doing the seeing, and a を after 君 to show you're the one being seen. Because their position and order alone won't reliably tell us that.

Does it make a little more sense? You could also just try reading more sentences with を (including from Renshuu's dictionary's Sentences tab) to get a grip on how they work.

@Shamugan You have a slight typo in your third sentence: "私がを"

Just letting you know :)

I think what can confuse English speakers is that Japanese particles "fuse" to what came before, while in English a particle links to the word after.

For example: I'm going to-->Tokyo vs. 東京<--に　行く.

In Japanese a particle changes the grammatical function of what it attaches to. In OP's example, りんご goes from being just a noun to りんごを which is an object that a verb can act on. And 私 goes from a simple pronoun to a subject 私が that can do the action.

I think it's useful to analyze a sentence not by words, like this:

私 ... が ... りんご ... を ... 食べる (just a jumble of words)

but rather like this:

私が ... りんごを ... 食べる (now it makes grammatical sense)

That way it's much more obvious who is the subject and object and how swapping をand が changes the meaning. As things become more complicated with modifiers and such, keeping this way of analyzing will help things make sense.

If you still have a hard time understanding it after all the answers above, I suggest watching CureDolly’s video about this. (I cannot do YouTube right now so I cannot link it for you)

I think I heard "Stop thinking about Japanese in an English perspecive"... or something along those lines from her videos.

I read some of her blogs as well which is a good food for thought about creating your Japanese mindset.

It is a great loss that she is not with us anymore.