apocalypse.webm
[Hide] (3.9MB, 640x480, 02:20) >>3031
>Jerry, the ball he kicked
That's the gist of it yes. Technically your "he" is redundant. Saying"Jerry wa, kare ga...", in english is "Jerry, he kicked the ball." That has a certain feel to it in English, but I don't know if the feeling translates. More than likely "kare ga" is going to be dropped as it's redundant information.
Speaking of dropping words, "the" and "a" are english particles which flat-out don't exist in japanese as particle words. Yet another instance of omitting contextually redundant information. When you say "neko da" and there's one cat, everyone knows you're talking about the one cat. If you say "neko da" and there's three cats, everyone knows you're talking about the three cats. There really is no need to pluralize or specify when the context does not create any confusion. It's both a blessing and curse, because it's quite simple way of doing things, but also pretty foreign to english.
Of course, when you actually need to express things that aren't contextually obvious you have to start using more words, and that's where the curse comes in. You can say "san-nin hito" if it's really important to specify that you're talking about three people. San means three, and nin is a particle which modifies hito to indicate that the count of people is three. There are different counter particles for different categories of things. For people, it's "nin" (as in ningen.) Animals use "hiko." There are a shit ton of these and I doubt it's worth anyone's time to start memorizing them at our level. Just remember the form <number> <particle> <noun> is mostly likely a counter noun phrase. This is why you should at least learn numbers up to ten. Otherwise you'll be fucked at recognizing these. (Fortunately once you know those everything else is pretty easy. Ten is juu, hachi is eight, juu-hachi is eighty. it's literally just like saying "ten eights.")
So plurals are weird, what about referring to a specific thing? There's no "The," but in english we can use "this" or "that" which fortunately do have equivalents in japanese: kore, sore, are, kono, sono, ano. Yeah there's a fuck ton of them. They all basically mean "this" or "that" though. Even in English "this" and "that" basically mean the same thing, just imply different proximity to the speakers. I won't bother to explain each one because I forget, I'm lazy, and like everything else, context makes it pretty obvious what is meant. They sound similar so they're easy to recognize.
Similarly, you'd most likely use a pronoun like "many", "some", "all", if you wanted to say "a ball." Again these are pronouns not particles, because they can be used standalone as if they were nouns nouns. This is speculation on my part, I actually don't know any of these and haven't seen them used. Might be totally wrong.
So to finish this off with the reason why I started typing this, your sentence should look more like:
>Jerry ball kicked
Yeah it makes no sense this way, but that's about it.
Fuck I got carried away.