Obligatory first post and apology for my bad English.
So, i’ve been learning Japanese for a while now and came across ほうがいいです. From what i’ve seen, they uses た and ない-form. (Example : 病院へ行ったほうがいいです and タバコを吸わないほうがいいです。）Why uses た instead of the regular non-past form? And vice versa, why use ない instead of なかった?
Thanks in advance!
1 comment
～た is not really a pure “past tense” and has a notion of what is known in linguistics as the perfective aspect (essentially, the completion of something, regardless of timeframe). ～たほうがいい emphasizes that completing ~ is better. In contrast, the negation uses ～ない rather than ～なかった because the speaker does _not_ want the action to be done and is _not_ limiting the applicability of that statement to a timeframe.