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I am a beginner. Here is the sentence in Tae-Kim guideline:

ボブ：うん。でも、明日雨が降るよ。

1/ Notice that the order is 明日雨. Is this order correct 雨明日 ?

2/ If not, suppose there are 3 or more nouns that can stand next to each other, is the order of nouns really important ?

Thank you.

Hoang Vu
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    Do you understand the meaning of the sentence, and of the individual words? Based on the meanings of the words, 雨明日が降る doesn't make any sense, and cannot be the correct word order. – Eiríkr Útlendi Apr 14 '21 at 23:37

1 Answers1

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In Japanese, grammatical clauses are generally marked as such by adding a specific particle at their ends.

For grammatical subjects, that particle is が. In your example sentence, the subject noun is 雨. Therefore the subject of your sentence is 雨が.

Note that this is a tightly coupled single lexical unit. In other words, you cannot just insert stuff (like 明日) in-between the clause head and its particle: "雨明日が" is nonsensical (a blatant syntax error) from the point of view of parsing the Japanese language.

That said, as long as you don't separate particles from their clauses, Japanese is quite flexible in allowing you to swap things around: "雨が明日降るよ" is a valid (if slightly odd) alternative. (With this word/clause order, the emphasis is more on 明日 than 雨, due to its proximity to the verb 降る.)

Will
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