Hello.
I’m fairly new to japanese and still am catching some vocabulary on and i came across a video for easy sentences on japanese.
One of the phrases says: “kyou udon tabetai desu” which closes on “I want to eat udon today.” ; I know ‘taberu’ means ‘eat’, so I thought ‘tabetai’ is a form in which you want to express “I want to + verb”.
Then i read another post that said you can say “verb + tsumori” to express “I want to + verb”.
What are, then, the differences betweens those two forms? When to use them? Is one more formal than the other?
3 comments
It’s like the difference between wanting to do something and something being a plan to do something.
At the beginning I wouldn’t worry too much. It will all fall into place as you progress in your studies.
But the obligatory warning I give my students about the -tai form: it is a very strong form and do not use it with persons of respect such as teachers. A colleague of mine once told me that they were shocked to hear when a student asked them “o-cha nomitai desu ka” when they were offered tea.
〜たい/-Tai is a verb ending that expresses desire, つもり/tsumori is a word that means “intention, intend, to mean to do, etc.”. So お寿司食べたい！/osushi tabetai! means “I want to eat sushi!” or “I’d like to eat sushi!”, while お寿司を食べるつもりだ/osushi wo taberu tsumori da is more “I intend to eat sushi”.
To the extent that they overlap I would call “tsumori” more formal, but it’s really closely related but different things being expressed for the most part. Tsumori can definitely appear in very informal contexts: そんなつもりじゃなかった！/sonna tsumori ja nakatta! “I didn’t mean to do that!” “I didn’t mean it like that!”.