Is English the only language that doesn’t distinguish topic and focus?
Hi. I am having a really hard time understanding. the difference between topic and focus. It feels like every other language I’ve looked at has ways to distinguish them. For example, Slavic and Romance languages use word order, Japanese and Korean have dedicated topic and subject markers but English has nothing. The word order is so damn fixed and we don’t have any particles to mark topic and focus. Sone people say it is similar to saying, “As for x” in English but that construction sounds unnatural to me and I don’t think very many people use it a lot. I literally feel like a Newspeak speaker trying to understand the concept of freedom. Can anyone give me any tips about how to identify topic versus focus please. I’m having so much trouble wrapping my head around it and it is making me so upset. I literally feel like I am incapable of understanding certain concepts due to my native language not expressing them.