han lønn -> hans lønn ?

Thx. I really have to wonder where I get these sentences from. I see it was posted 01:32 AM, so maybe I had been drinking :)

Changed it to "lønnen hans" because "hans lønn" *tends* to sound more like Danish. In 'pure' Norwegian "din" should be postpositioned, except in cases where emphasis on "din" is desired.

"Det er ditt problem at du ikke liker poteter!"
"It's YOUR problem that you don't like potatoes"

"Problemet ditt er trivielt i forhold til hva andre har å stri med."
"Your problem is trivial in comparison to what other people deal with."
(though in this case, postpositioned makes sense and not prepositioned so perhaps the rules that dictate usage are a bit more complicated than I supposed)

I guess a habit also has a role to play in this, without some special rule. Thanks a lot for explanations.

Well you know, a teacher shouldn't really be saying "There are no rules, you'll just have to develop a sense for the language through usage."

But I really did find when learning Japanese that certain grammatical rules were impossible to quickly get a good grasp of. (especially wa/ga particle usage)

I read everything I could on these particles, and I noticed that different grammaticians had different elaborate theories. All the theories had the advantage that the explanations roughly corresponded to actual usage, but there were so many exceptions that they were nothing but an inaccurate 'map of the territory.'

5 years or so later I could kind of get wa/ga right, and a total 10 years later even a bit better. In-case you're interested, "wa" is the topic marker, and ga is the subject marker. Now, there's a difference between topic and subject, but this can be hard to wrap one's head around. In some cases _both_ "wa" and "ga" are used in the same sentence, and using them incorrectly in such cases alters the entire grammatical hierarchy of the sentence (suddenly a subject is no longer the subject) - though mostly a Japanese would be able to understand what you mean. And indeed these particles can be omitted in casual language a lot of the time, and in that case the Japanese listener's brain would just fill in the gaps. Proper intonation though would of course play a bigger role than before if they are omitted :)

Well, there is always a rule. Even to such degree that one language can be precisely automatically translated to another (Naom Chomsky, Universal Grammar, deep structure, Swedish GF (link on my profile)), the question is only how those rules can get complicated to account for every minor exception, etc. Man has been always considering something random (or done by Divines influence), if it gets too complex.

I've heard about 'ga' and 'wa', though I have no idea what is precisely about. I had planned to learn Japanese. Recently, I was searching for various approaches for learning languages, and one site was worth enough to be bookmarked. It mentions wa/ga (as it appears to be common difficulty). It is elementary, for you, of course. Someone else might it find useful.
www.japaneseaudiolessons.com

But your point stays on solid ground, since we actually don't need to be perfect. Generally, people are glad if you have learned their language, and can be forgiving for minor mistakes.

Haha, the notorious "wa" and "ga". I can never really explain the difference yet, but I hope our sentences will help the learners (and me!) understand it better.

One example of a complex sentence with both "wa" and "ga" and omissions of particles:
[#3137753] 「トムは人が恥ずかしがってるの（を）見るの（が）好きなの？」「それは否定しないな」

One example that shows how the particle "wa" can make a sentence simpler than in other languages:
[#2737373] 野球は見るよりやる方が面白い。
The topic of the sentence "baseball + wa" is at the same time the object of the verbs "watch" and "play" as well as the subejct of the predicate "is fun". You don't need a single pronoun.

@neron
Oh, have you planned studying Japanese? Then you should give it a try, it would make me glad!
(Since I'm not being nice to non-native speakers who add Japanese sentences here, you might think I'm intolerant and mean to "foreigners", but that's not the case. I'm really happy when people learn and try to use my language even if it's not perfect. I just hate it when people teach wrong or bad Japanese. I'm being picky here because I think Tatoeba is a place we teach what we know for sure.)

Yes, but I won't start anytime soon. First, I have to master Norwegian. Well, since I am aware how big influence Tatoeba has on learning tools, in general, it is not at all trivial if one allow bad things to "go public". Your example is something we all should follow. I am sad for the state of my native language, Serbian, here on Tatoeba, with huge amount of totally unnatural sentences. Good thing is that no one wants to learn it. But it bothers me.

All this we now, maybe it should be presented to new users in such way. Not as set of rules for behavior, but the reason behind it. Than it might have greater impact.