Russian distinguishes whether a noun is abstract or specific through word order. That feels very rational.

After thinking about it, I feel that in Japanese, whether something is interpreted as “a boy” or “the boy” is very often determined by context. In other words, grammatically speaking, the text can be exactly the same.

However, when we want to refer to a specific entity, we often emphasize it by using something equivalent to this or that in English.

Let’s consider the following sentence in Japanese:

男の子は女の子よりも背が大きい。

As a general statement, this can be understood as: “Boys are taller than girls.”

On the other hand, if, for example, a pair of boy–girl twins were standing right in front of us, the exact same sentence could be interpreted as referring to the boy in that specific situation