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I am practicing coming up with some random sentences to practice my Japanese, sadly I'm using Google translator to check out if my sentence is right. Now the following sentence

私はあなたが好きです

I understand that the が particle is telling like "you are the one I like" referring to あなた. At this point Google translation is OK. But when I try to replace あなた for something else, the sentence gets all messed up, and it seems that Google will only understand the sentence if I remove the が particle. So my sentence would be:

寒い日に私はコーヒを飲むが好きです

But Google will only understand it if I remove が [寒い日に私はコーヒーを飲む好きです]

Why is that? Why replacing あなた for コーヒーを飲む makes the sentence change so that I need to remove が

Felipe Chaves de Oliveira
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    You should -never- trust Google Translate between languages as different as English and Japanese. English and Spanish, maybe; but its performance with very typologically distant languages is -absolutely terrible-. – Sjiveru Jul 29 '16 at 17:35
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    Firstly, you need to nominalize it with こと or の to make 飲む a noun: コーヒーを飲むことが好きです. Also, Google isn't the best thing to use to check your sentences. 「寒い日に私はコーヒーを飲む好きです」is wrong. – Blavius Jul 29 '16 at 17:35
  • Is there a good option for online translation? – Felipe Chaves de Oliveira Jul 29 '16 at 17:52
  • @Felipe: No, Google Translate is just about the best there is right now, as it should be with the vast sums of money continually being poured into the development of its technology. There is no good machine translator between English and Japanese at this time. If there were, it would be harder to motivate myself to learn the language! There is such a big disconnect that not only grammar and vocabulary, but also a very powerful AI are necessary to bridge the gap. – Nick O. Jul 30 '16 at 00:37
  • @NickOveracker Altavista's Babelfish was passable. It's the new breed of (statistical) machine-learning translators that are awful. – oals Jul 30 '16 at 11:13
  • Possible duplicate of [を vs が with use against 好き?](http://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/3473/%e3%82%92-vs-%e3%81%8c-with-use-against-%e5%a5%bd%e3%81%8d) – broccoli facemask Jul 30 '16 at 15:35

1 Answers1

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Google Translate was confused because you failed to add a nominalizer. A verb cannot be the object of "like" unless properly nominalized in English, either. See: Question with this sentence わたしはえをみるのがすきです

You cannot trust Google Translate in general, but it works at least with your sample.

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寒い日に私はコーヒーを飲む好きです (the third sentence above) is grammatically wrong (actually it looks the worst among the three), but Google Translate successfully "guessed" its meaning. After all, it's not designed to point out the grammatical error in the original sentence. Don't use Google Translate to check if your sentence is grammatically okay.

By the way, you're seeing "but" in the second example above because dictionary-form-of-a-verb + が is one of the ways to say "but" in Japanese.

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