I recently learned the と思う form to write sentences like this:
私は彼女はパーティーに行くと思う: I think she will go to the party.
I have also learned how to negate the verb.
私は彼女はパーティーに行かないと思う: I think she will not go to the party.
However, this sentence sounds pretty unnatural in English, and many would rather say: “I DON’T think she will go to the party”: 私は彼女はパーティーに行くと思わない
My question is, which is more preferred in Japanese, and which one sounds more natural?
3 comments
i would use 行かないと思う when responding to someone to correct, contrast, or otherwise relate to something already said about the person going
however, as a default, Xとは思わない (you forgot the は) is SO common as a pattern that
とは alone at the end of a sentence automatically infers 思わない or 思えない even if unsaid
彼女がパーティーに行くとは = i don’t think she’d go to the party
Does the fact that an English translation of a Japanese sentence not being natural matter at all?
Firstly, your use of “〜は” in the subordinate clause should be “〜が”. “私は彼女がパーティーに行くと思う。” is the correct form. Japanese really does not like putting noncontrastive “〜は” in subordinate clauses.
English for these kinds of negative thoughts externalizes the negative into the matrix clause, even though the semantic negative is actually in the embedded clause. One can argue this is a strange, counter-intuitive quirk of English. One can argue it should be “I think she’ll not go to the party.” because that’s what it actually means, but in English one says “I don’t think she’ll go to the party.” to mean that, and to mean what one would expect with “I don’t think she’ll go to the party.” one says “I don’t necessarily think she’ll go to the party.”
Japanese does it how one expects. Another thing is that English tenses inside of embedded clauses do not work as one would expect and one says “I thought she wasn’t at the party.”, one would expect. “I thought she isn’t at the party.” because at the time of thinking, the state of being at the party was not past, in Japanese one does say. “私は彼女がパーティーにいないと思った。”, one can in fact also say 私は彼女がパーティーにいたと思った。”, which means that at the time of thinking it was already past. Perhaps in the past thinking about a party that happened before the thinking; English lacks this distinction.
But, Japanese also has places where it uses this counter-intuitive structure. Such as “パーティーに行きたくない。”, for “I don’t want to go to the party.”, this means the same as in English, and one would expect “パーティーに行かなくありたい。” in Japanese or “I want to not go to the party.” in English, because that is what it really means. It express a want to not go, not a lack of a want to go. But languages aren’t this elegant and this is how both are expressed in either language, even though a more “logical” analysis of the constituent parts would infer a different meaning from the one that is actually used.