〜がする smells / sounds / feels like: Meaning & Examples

How 〜がする works

The sensation itself is the grammatical subject, marked with が, and する carries the sense of “there is” or “I’m getting”. English makes the person the subject — “I smell something” — while Japanese makes the smell the subject and leaves you out of the sentence entirely. That mismatch is what keeps the pattern feeling strange long after you can produce it.

構文こうぶんConstruction

• Sensation noun + がする

  台所からいい匂いがします。 — There’s a lovely smell coming from the kitchen.

• The nouns that fit: 音・声・匂い・味・香り・寒気・吐き気・感じ

  変な味がする。 — It tastes strange.

• Past: 〜がした

  外で大きな音がした。 — There was a loud noise outside.

• 気がする — “I get the feeling that”

  どこかで会った気がします。 — I feel like we’ve met somewhere.

例文れいぶんIn a sentence

注意点ちゅういてんNuances

• Swapping in は turns the sensation into a topic being contrasted (“as for the smell…”), which is almost never what a plain observation wants.
• It covers sensations you receive, not things you deliberately look at. Sight belongs to 見える and 見る — ×景色がする is not Japanese, though 気配がする (“I sense someone there”) is perfectly natural.
• 〜がする reports a sensation happening; 〜がある reports existence. 音がする means you can hear it right now.
• 気がする is by far the most common member of the family, and it hedges. 忘れた気がする is “I’ve a feeling I forgot”, not “I forgot” — useful when you want to avoid committing.

練習れんしゅうYour Turn

Tip

Describe walking into a kitchen where someone is cooking: name one smell, one sound and one taste with 〜がする. Then add what you vaguely suspect is on the stove, using 〜気きがします.

〜がする (smells / sounds / feels like) in real sentences

Each one is quoted from a published Japanese text in this library and links to the story it came from. Some use older spellings, or break off where the sentence carried on. They are transcribed exactly as their authors wrote them.

Appears in 5 of 367 texts in our library.