Hi all. I’m a beginner in Japanese so explanations in English would be appreciated. I came upon this sentence: “田中さんは帰りたそうだ。” I believe it’s grammatically correct to sayたいinstead of た, but I’m wondering why this is so, if たいcan simply be abbreviated toたin colloquial speech or something else. Thanks ahead!
4 comments
Generally たがっている rather than たそう
Not 100% sure but I think that the たい form work the the same as the い adjectives. So when using そうだ you have to replace い by そうだ. Same for the conjugation “帰りたい” become “帰りたくない” in the negative form. Hope i’m understandable !
Yeah those are slightly different meanings… or rather one is kind of colloquial/grammatically incorrect.
For the ～そうだ pattern:
田中さんは帰りたい＋そうだ would be “I hear that/it seems that” Tanaka-san wants to go home.
With adjectives like itai (painful/hurt) then いたい＋そう＝いたそう or “that seems painful”
So I can imagine someone sort of colloquially/spoken casual speech sort of adopting that pattern and saying 帰りたそう tho it would not be actually grammatically correct.
Not your core question but this explains the difference between 帰りたがる and 帰りたそう, since every single answer brings that up: https://hinative.com/ja/questions/18913009
> 帰りたそうは、相手がそうしたいと思っているんだろうなと、相手の気持ちを感じること
>
>帰りたがるは、早く帰りたいと言ってくる感じです
Basically, 帰りたそう is more like you can kind of assume they want to go home (maybe they look bored, for instance) while 帰りたがる is more like someone outright saying “I want to go home already!”