Hi everyone,
I am contacting because I just went through the lesson 16 from Genki about the use of 時 to say « When A, B ».
The way Genki explains the tense to use in the sentences A and B is dependant on which occurs first.
However, several natives (Inc. my Japanese tutor) I discussed with couldn’t explain me why but they found the idea of using the present tense in A while the whole sentence is past tense was completely unnatural.
Apparently, for past tense sentence, no matter the occurrence order, you would expect both sentences to be in the past.
For present/future actions, while it sounded more correct for them to have both sentences in present tenses, they also agreed that having sentence A in past sentence would be correct.
I just would like to get the feedback from more people, natives, bilingual or living in Japan.
Thanks a lot!
2 comments
Basically the point is that in Japanese there are 2 types of perspective. Events can be described from ongoing perspective with absolute time reference like English, or events can be described depending on a tense of each other. Usually people look at how related it is, such way tightly connected clauses are more likely to have relative time reference, while independent clauses are more likely to have absolute time reference. For example, て form connects verbs so tightly that in a lot of situations we have many constrains if we can use it or not.
There are some criteria, for example, when we talk about personal things like expectations, objective, reasons and so on, it’s quite common to get more involved and speak from the point of that participant/time like “～るためにした”. Despite it’s the past occurrence, verb in ために clause would be often said with る tense. On the other hand if actions have more incidental relation, then it’s more often used with absolute time reference. In case of recollection it can be more intentional, because we have a clear line between what happened before and now. Of course when we use something like 時, it can become more complex, because on one hand we have a clear clause dependence and therefore relative time reference is possible, but on the other there might be many reasons or simply a feeling to speak from ongoing perspective too.
In literature it can vary even more and authors often use different tenses to switch between narrative and characters. I’m not sure if people need to learn it as a kind of overall system when one perspective is more popular than another, or it’s more about practice and training to feel it.
> However, several natives (Inc. my Japanese tutor) I discussed with couldn’t explain me why but they found the idea of using the present tense in A while the whole sentence is past tense was completely unnatural.
Either you misunderstood or they were on crack. [Here](https://upload.i.ng/file/incompatiblytacklingphlegmatic/image.png) is a very exhaustive explanation of the とき grammar including tense shenanigans.
Sentences like 「私はご飯を食べる時、手を洗った」 seem to be fine as explained there.