I studied Spanish for years in school. In Spanish, you learn the conditional, the imperfect, the pluperfect, etc. I realized I don’t really know how to convey these things in Japanese. I’m currently mid-N3. I realize a lot of these things probably aren’t directly translatable and may just be implied.
How do I say things like:
* If we are walking, I **would** like to leave now. (conditional)
* If I were you, I **would** eat beforehand. (conditional)
* I **used to** play that game all the time (imperfect)
* I **had already eaten** by the time you left. (pluperfect)
* If you come in the morning, I **will have already left** by then. (future perfect)
* If I turned that paper in, I **would have failed**. (conditional perfect).
* I **should have worn** a hat today.
Any help would be appreciated.
And if you know of any resources that explain Japanese grammar the other way around (English formations to Japanese instead of explaining Japanese structures) that would be great too.
16 comments
It’s better if you post how YOU would say those first.
Someone will help you if you make any mistake.
Check out the -eba, -tara and -nara endings. Also the -方がいい. I think JapaneseAmmoWithMisa has all the videos on her channel
Japanese ammo with misa , nihongo no mori both are excellent for explaining grammar
https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-grammar/how-conditionals-work/
The exact equivalent to those tenses don’t really exist in Japanese, but /u/pixelboy1459 [wrote a post](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/rmrgfq/japanese_conditionals/) that I found helpful in explaining the difference between some “if” equivalents, which covers part of what you’re asking about.
This is very simple grammar. If you’ve been studying for years, then I wonder what exactly you’ve been studying. You should get a textbook, or perhaps *A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar*, which covers this.
In any case, these formulations (and English grammar in general) don’t map 1-to-1 to Japanese grammar. Learning Japanese in this way will make you sound unnatural.
If others know better, please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. It should be noted that I’m doing a direct translation and not necessarily something which would be culturally or contextually correct.
* If we are walking, I **would** like to leave now. (conditional) – なら
歩くなら、今すぐ出かけたいんです。
* If I were you, I **would** eat beforehand. (conditional) – たら
私だったら、その前に食べるんですよ。
* I **used to** play that game all the time (imperfect) – もの
そのゲームではいつも遊んだものです。
* I **had already eaten** by the time you left. (pluperfect) – もう
あなたが出かけたとき、私はもう食べてしまいました。
* If you come in the morning, I **will have already left** by then. (future perfect) -ば
あなたが朝に来れば、私はもう出発したんです。
* If I turned that paper in, I **would have failed**. (conditional perfect). -たら
その作文を出したら、失敗すしたはずでしょう。
* I **should have worn** a hat today. たら・ば
今日、帽子をかぶったら・かぶればよかったんです。
Edit: corrected
It’s a very complex topic. I’m not sure I can explain it properly in few words, but I can advise several links. It’s good to start with something like this:
[https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/toki-in-japanese.html](https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/toki-in-japanese.html)
[https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/japanese-conditional-form-to.html](https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/japanese-conditional-form-to.html)
[https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/japanese-conditional-form-temo.html](https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/japanese-conditional-form-temo.html)
[https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/japanese-conditional-form-ba-nara.html](https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/japanese-conditional-form-ba-nara.html)
[https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/japanese-conditional-form-tara.html](https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/japanese-conditional-form-tara.html)
[https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/tara-sentence-special-case.html](https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/tara-sentence-special-case.html)
[https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/tara-sentence-discovery.html](https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/tara-sentence-discovery.html)
In my opinion this site has the best conditional forms explanation. However, this is only direct usage. If you want to make hypothetical and counterfactual sentences, then you need to read something like this:
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332249939_Conditionals_in_Japanese_in_Handbook_of_Japanese_Semantics_and_Pragmatics_Ed_by_Wesley_Jacobsen_Harvard_U_and_Yukinori_Takubo_NINJAL](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332249939_Conditionals_in_Japanese_in_Handbook_of_Japanese_Semantics_and_Pragmatics_Ed_by_Wesley_Jacobsen_Harvard_U_and_Yukinori_Takubo_NINJAL)
You can ignore more linguistic parts, because you only need basic idea for categories and examples. As a rule of thumb, when we talk about the future, it’s unsettled. There are many ways how it can go, so we simply talk about one of options like “if it’s going to rain tomorrow, then I will stay home”. It’s different when we talk about the past, because the result is already known and nothing can change that, but we don’t know what is that, so based on indirect information we try to figure that out. The only difference between this and counterfactual form is that in the latter we already know the result and think about how it could go other direction in other situation. Because it’s not very convenient, not always both speaker and listener know about occurrences to actually negate that and get counterfactual meaning, people often use fake-past tool. It’s the same in English and Japanese. For example, when we say “if it were (something) tomorrow”, we have a confrontation between past “were” and future “tomorrow”. Such way we get counterfactual meaning. Similarly when we talk about past action, we can use double-past layer like “if they had done (something)…”, with both “had” and “done” in past form. Japanese follows the same logic with the only difference that there are 4 conditional forms, and because each form has slightly different usage, on practice our need to use some tools depends on these traits. For example, both と and たら can be used with one-time events in the past in factual meaning, but ば can’t. Thus sentence like 安ければ買いました (when it’s used for one-time event) is automatically counter-factual and can’t be used for something like “I bought this thing when it was cheap”, despite “cheap” can be a condition for buying. That’s why you need solid understanding of each conditional form and only after that you can judge which meanings are possible in specific case.
Other common tools are adding speculations like だろう, which automatically moves from factual to hypothetical, or using のに・方がいい, which automatically implies it would be better to do other way, therefore counterfactual.
Regarding conditionals:
Something that might be hard to wrap your head around is that there is no “conditional mood” (or whatever you want to call it) in Japanese like there is in Spanish; i.e. there’s nothing corresponding to the English “would.” You just say the second part of the sentence normally. (I.e. you say the “would X” part as if it were just “X”.) If you want to add some uncertainty to what you’re saying, you can add でしょう, だろう, etc., but these just mark uncertainty / guessing regardless of whether there is a condition attached.
The first part of the sentence (the one that’s marked with the word “if,” the subjunctive, etc.) _is_ marked explicitly, like others said, with the particles なら・たら・ば・と. Some of the nuances that are expressed by changing the moods / tenses of the two sentences in English and Spanish are expressed in Japanese by changing the conditional particle.
(By the way, I don’t think your first example is a true conditional use of would, I think it’s just the polite request “I would like to ~”: If you remove the “like to” then it sounds weird [“If we are walking, I would leave now”] unless you remove the “would” [“If we are walking, I am leaving now”]. You would maybe express this in Japanese something like できれば〜たいんだけど)
ーたら、ーば、なら、と
I think a big thing that seems to be tripping you up is not knowing how to say thing in the subjunctive mood (would), the future tense, or the perfect tense. Those are all grammatical features that Japanese just doesn’t have.
Now that doesn’t mean that you can’t express the same ideas, it just means that the grammar isn’t doing as much heavy lifting to convey nuance and meaning as it would be in English. For example, despite not having a future tense, you can of course talk about the future in Japanese. It’s just that in order to know if someone’s talking about the present or the future, you have to pay attention to context clues and time marker phrases rather than just the verb tense.
This is why direct translation can be not a great idea. Often to express the same idea in two different languages, you have to approach the idea from slightly different angles. If you try to sub out grammar point for grammar point, it’ll just leave you confused
There’s a chapter in 13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese that is actually all about practicing the conditional 🙂 (See if you can get it from a library or find the pdf online) It’s a little dated (90’s vibes), but it has a fun little manga chapter where they use these clauses over and over, and suggests you find or make something similar for other verb forms that you need to practice.
This is one of the problems with self-assessed N levels. You claim you’re “mid-N3″…..yet despite years of study you’ve never encountered this N4 shit yet.
https://blog.cardemy.com/jlpt-n4-the-conditional-form?hs_amp=true
*What* and *how* have you been studying for years that just somehow skipped right over this?
I kinda feel Iike several of the examples are very much textbook examples and don’t really represent how a natural conversation would flow.
Even for some of the things you want to say, can be said more simply and not to the extent you want to express in English.
My Japanese isn’t perfect. I took N2 a long time ago and failed by like two points. Lol. I quit studying then. But I speak Japanese at home as my primary language (husband is Japanese). And I also speak Spanish natively. This is how I personally would say the above:
– first sentence to me seems unnatural in English and also seems unnatural in Japanese : 歩いてたら、戻りたい。
-私はあなたとしたら、先に食べたらいいと思う
-前によく遊んでたゲームです
-あなたが帰ってた時に私はもう食べた状態だった。
-if you come in the morning I will have already left: to be honest, I’m having a hard time with this one. I’d probably say something like: I won’t be here in the morning if you come early. Or 朝早く来れば私はいないかもしれない。
– あの作文を提出したら失敗したかもしれない。
– 帽子かぶてよかった。
In summary, I wouldn’t focus on the exact literal translation of everything. Just understand how to get your idea across.
In Spanish I can see why it’s easier to think more literally since the languages are similar.
– si caminamos, me gustaría regresar
– si fuera usted, comería antemano
– antes jugaba ese juego mucho
– ya había comido cuando te fuiste
– si vienes por la mañana ya hubiera salido de casa.
– si hubiera entregado ese reporte hubiera reprobado.
– debería de haber usado gorra.
I’m not familiar with grammatical terminology in Spanish but it looks like the example sentences have “hubiera” or “ia” endings. There’s no exact way (off the top of my head) to think like this in Japanese.
I’m going to echo u/ChoiceAd607 ‘s comment: write what you think should be the correct way first.
The best and fastest way to learn is from making mistakes first so you know where you’re deficient.