ことだ: "One ought to..."

Introduction

If you want to get good at Japanese, you should pay attention to this lesson! ...Is what I would say if I was going to try and use today's grammar in English at you as a sort of opening tag or something.

Wait, did I just do that?

こと: You love 'em, you hate 'em

Over the course of this island (and the one following it, the scenic Sands of Mastery), you'll come to have a love/hate relationship with こと. It's great in the sense that it's a versatile piece of grammar that can be used in all sorts of interesting ways. At the same time, it's awful in the sense that it pops up in so many different places that it can be hard to keep track of what the heck it means in a given situation.

My advice is to try and think of each usage of こと as having a separate and distinct meaning and usage, rather than trying to think of one overarching definition. After all, こと really just means "thing"... how much more ambiguous can you get?!