“Japanese has no grammatical gender, number, or articles.” – Wikipedia
“Japanese doesn’t use any equivalent of a, an, or the. In translating from English to Japanese these can simply be dropped.” – Nihongo o Narau
I’ve seen this claim about Japanese and Korean many times, but I disagree. There are what we would consider articles (or equivalents of) in Japanese and Korean, but they aren’t as rigidly necessary as in English grammar. I think we might even consider them present but nullified – Phantom articles.
Consider these examples:
お金を半分使った。その残りを貯金しようと。
Literally, I used half of the money. I think I’ll save that remainder.
More naturally, we’d render the sentence as, “I used half of the money. I think I’ll save the remainder.”
Of course, you could argue that the その can be dropped. Observe:
お金を半分使った。残りを貯金しようと。
But when you pose the question, どの残り？you’d be left answering, as simply as possible, その残り。
So that takes care of the definite article. Let’s look at the indefinite.
講義では、ある生徒が次々に質問をした。
Literally, A certain student at the lecture asked question after question.
To put it a bit more colloquially, “A student at the lecture asked question after question.”
To be a little more abstract, you might say 講義では、生徒が次々に質問をした。 In this case, however, it could be a single student, a couple, a dozen, or the entire class. So to clarify once again we ask どの生徒？ to which we can answer ある生徒が。
This same tendency occurs in Korean as well. From the dictionary:
책을 샀다지? 그 나머지 돈은 어떻게 했어?
Bought a book, have you? And what have you done with the rest of the money?
As in Japanese, the 그 could be literally taken as ‘that’, but it acts as a definite article, referring to the money spent on a book. Or, to turn it around, ‘the’ in English acts as a rigid definite article, unremovable from the noun, much the same way that we can’t drop the subject in English like we can in Japanese or Korean once it’s clear. But just because a subject might not be explicitly expressed doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
To say that Japanese and Korean “have no articles” is misleading, and to say that in translation they can “simply be dropped” is extremely so.
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I would mention as another good example of an article in Korean 무슨, as in
무슨 학생이 쓴 거 같애
It looks like it was written by a (some) student.
Thanks for pointing that out, Joe – I didn’t think to mention it.
I’ve also come to dislike the Wikipedia claim that there is no “grammatical number” in Japanese, because there is, just as there is in Korean (たち, 들). It does exist, but it’s just not always necessary like it is in English.
昔々、おじいさんとおばあさんが(ga)おりました。おじいさんは(wa)、山へ柴刈りに……
in this case がis an indefinite article
わ is a definite article
There you go – More evidence to support my argument! I’m thinking of forming the League of Japanese Article Recognition.