Today, we’re gonna talk about the particle も.

When も is used in a sentence, it tends to be recognizable as a part of three distinct patterns.

They are:
〜も 〜も〜 (where, our ～ would be us repeating the same word before and after も) and… 〜も〜 (!) but with this pattern, we’d place words that are distinct from one another before and after も).

This’ll all make sense when we see our examples…, which… we’ll do right now.

Let’s have a look at a few sentences using this pattern one: 〜も. In this first sentence, も is being used to help communicate the idea of also, or in addition to, or as well… here, Kusunoki is ALSO joining the workshop. The implication, of course, is that someone ELSE is going to join. Obviously, a familiar usage to you.

In our second sentence, we see も being used to help communicate this idea of even…. Now, even is kind of a hard word to define, but basically when we use it, we tend to do so when we want to say that something is UNEXPECTED…, or…, the last thing that would come to mind…, the least evident…

…it helps us intensify the validity of a statement. So, for example, “Ah, this math problem is so simple, even a monkey could do it,”
…or, “What? You can’t put an egg in the microwave… even a child knows that.”

We see this easily in our second sentence. Here, も helps us frame an already imagined difficult workout as superbly difficult because EVEN super-fit Tony has an issue with it.

By the way, our Tony in this example is Tony Horton of P90X fame… and if you have any knowledge of Tony, the idea of any sort of workout being difficult for him would without a doubt be unexpected!

Additionally, like our Kusunoki sentence, も also brings unmentioned “others” into the sentence through implication…. suggesting that they too (or, we too) would surely have difficulty with the workout if that’s the case with Tony.

And, lastly, in our third sentence, も helps us outwardly project deeply felt feelings with intensity. So, with our cherry blossom sentence, the feeling we get with this use of も helps communicate the sincerity of the speaker or writer… it’s a sense we wouldn’t get with a less emotionally capable particle like は or が.

Let’s now move on to our second pattern: 〜も〜.

The obvious change here is one of repetition… And… this repetition of ～ before and after も gives us some pretty neat opportunities to play with idioms which everybody likes, right? Okay, let’s look at a few sentences.

In this first sentence, we take a single word, and repeat it before and after も. This makes it so we can lend extra emphasis to that word. So, here in this sentence we’re stressing the importance of the moment…, or opportunity… in repeating 折.

With our second and third sentences we’re gonna take that 〜も〜 pattern and repeat the ENTIRE pattern.

But (!), the word that gets repeated in the first 〜も〜 set will be different in the second 〜も〜 set.

This’ll make sense when you see it in action. The cool thing about this repetition of the entire 〜も〜 pattern is that when we do so, we unlock that familiar expression-like phrasing that produces idioms.

The scaffolding for this repetition looks like this:

See that なら in the first scaffold, and だが in the second… we’ll show you how to choose which is best in just a minute.

First, meaning.

We can use this expression when we want to levy criticism against two different…, but related…, parties. We use it when we want to say BOTH parties are to blame. So, we scorn the parent AND the child, the deceivers AND the gullible. Pulling this off from a structure standpoint is easy. We introduce the first guilty party in our first instance of 〜も〜…,

…add either なら or だが…, …then, introduce the second guilty party in our second instance of 〜も〜.

That’s it. Easy.

You should know that when we craft a sentence with this expression, the first guilty party will always be a person or entity one could easily find fault with. By juxtaposing these two guilty parties, we effectively end up comparing them to one another.

Okay, so なら or だが… which to choose? Well, we use なら when we want to compare two things that are more alike…