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Here, Bob is indicating that his question is about Alice. Notice how the 「だ」 is left out and yet the English translation has the word 'are' and 'am'. Since we know the topic is Alice, we don't need anything else to guess that Alice is a student. In fact, since Bob is asking a question, he can't attach 「だ」. That would be like trying to make a statement and asking a question at the same time.
Since we have no context, we don't have enough information to make any sense of this conversation. It obviously makes no sense for Jim to actually be tomorrow. Given a context, as long as the sentence has something to do with Jim and tomorrow, it can mean anything. For instance, they could be talking about when an exam is being held.
We need to realize how generic the topic can really be. A topic can be referring to any action or object from anywhere even including other sentences. For example, in the last sentence of the conversation above, even though the sentence is about when the exam is for Jim, the word "exam" doesn't appear anywhere in the sentence!
We'll see a more specific particle that ties more closely into the sentence at the end of this lesson with the identifier particle.
Notice, that Alice must be consistent with the inclusion. It would not make sense to say, "I am a student, and Tom is also not a student." Instead, Alice would use the 「は」 particle to remove the additional meaning of inclusion as seen in the next example.
So why would Alice, all of a sudden, talk about Tom when Bob is asking about Alice? Maybe Tom is standing right next to her and she wants to include Tom in the conversation.
This is where the 「が」 particle comes into play. It is also referred to as the subject particle but I hate that name since "subject" means something completely different in English grammar. Instead, I move to call it the identifier particle because the particle indicates that the speaker wants to identify something unspecified.
Bob wants to identify who among all the possible candidates is a student. Alice responds that Jim is the one. Notice, Alice could also have answered with the topic particle to indicate that, speaking of Jim, she knows that he is a student (maybe not the student). You can see the difference in the next example.
Hopefully, you can see that （１） seeks to identify a specific person for 'student' while （２） is simply talking about the student. You cannot replace 「が」 with 「は」 in （１） because "who" would become the topic and the question would become, "Is who a student?"
The two particles 「は」 and 「が」 may seem very similar only because it is impossible to translate the difference directly into English. For example, 「私は学生」 and 「私が学生」 both translate into, "I am student."* However, they only seem similar because English cannot express information about the context as succinctly as Japanese sometimes can. In the first sentence 「私は学生」, since 「私」 is the topic, the sentence means, "Speaking about me, I am a student". However, in the second sentence, 「私」 is specifying who the 「学生」 is. If we want to know who the student is, the 「が」 particle tells us its 「私」.
You can also think about the 「が」 particle as always answering a silent question. For example, if we have 「ジムが魚だ」, we are answering a question such as "Who is the fish?" or "Which person is the fish?" or maybe even "What food does Jim like?" Or given the sentence, 「これが車」, we can be answering the question, "Which is the car?" or "What is the car?" The 「は」 and 「が」 particles are actually quite different if you think of it the right way. The 「が」 particle identifies a specific property of something while the 「は」 particle is used only to bring up a new topic of conversation. This is why, in longer sentences, it is common to separate the topic with commas to remove ambiguity about which part of the sentence the topic applies to.
*Well technically, it's the most likely translation given the lack of context.
This page has last been revised on 2006/9/15