Languages are interesting because each one has its own unique features. For example, double negatives like “I didn’t see nothing” are considered incorrect in English, although they’re perfectly permissible in Spanish. If you’ve watched some anime in Japanese or had dinner with a Japanese family, you may have noticed the word that’s spoken before eating, itadakimasu, pronounced “ee-tah-dah-ki-MAHS.” Essentially meaning “I humbly receive the gift of this food” or less obsessively “let’s eat,” it’s a polite way to thank the person who made the food for you, and the word is interesting because it illustrates some of the “back end” of Japanese grammar. There are two verbs for “to receive” in Japanese, morau and itadaku; the former is a neutral word, which you’d use when telling your wife about the movie tickets you got from a co-worker, but the latter is a polite word that basically means to receive something from someone socially higher than you, like your boss or a guest. (It’s the root of the word itadakimasu.) Since subjects are often left off of Japanese sentences, it’s conceivable that you might find yourself in a linguistic situation that called for you to understand the overall context of a sentence based on what verb someone chose to use. For example, my mother-in-law might say to me, “Itadakimashita yo,” which essentially means “[we] received [something from someone].” It would be up to me to figure out the larger context, namely that we’d received some gift from someone that my mother-in-law wants to be polite to who’s standing nearby, and I should come and say thank you to that person for the gift. Japanese can be a confusing language, but with practice, some of these situations start to make sense.
This might be more Japanese than you wanted to know. And if so, I apologize ^_^
