Do double negatives act the same way in Japanese as they do in English?
I deleted my example and whatnot because it wasn’t actually
A double negative but my brain is just wrong and overthinking it.
Also the explanations provided did answer my question.
4 comments
That’s not a double negative. A double negative is when a negative negates another negative, which isn’t happening in the last sentence of either of your English or Japanese examples. Instead what’s happening is that the negative is being expanded upon and explained.
A double negative would be more like “I’m not not sad” (I am sad), which would be something like 悲しくなくない in Japanese. Double negatives do tend to work the same in Japanese as in English where they usually create a positive.
Think about English sentences like:
**No,** he **didn’t** play much.
**No**, I **don’t** own a PS5.
**No**, I’m **not** going.
That’s not a double negative. Even in English, that sentence ‘no, he did not’ means ‘he did *not*’. That’s not even a Japanese knowledge problem, that’s an English knowledge problem.
That said, yes, double negatives do work similar to English in that they negate each other. This is even used in a regular grammar piece: ～なければならない. The Japanese equivalent for ‘must’ is achieved by saying that you ‘cannot not do X’.
those aren’t double negatives
however, yes double negatives work that way:
彼はやさしくなく（は）ない = he isn’t NOT nice (i.e. he is “nice”, but maybe not so much)
and double negatives are extremely common in a lot of major grammar patterns:
５時、帰らなければならない = at 5, if i don’t go home, it won’t work out = “i must go home at 5”
if you didn’t get to it yet 帰らなければ is one of the ways to say the “if not” form of 帰る＝かえる, i.e. “if i don’t go home”