Hello
I have just started learning japanese. My plan is to watch anime with japanese subtitles and parse every sentence, plus watching some grammer lessons.
There is a sentence in the first episode of naruto that goes like this:
その尾一度振らば山崩れ津波立つ。
I can’t find anything about らば. I ran the whole sentence through Google translate and found that it means “if”. But when I’m only searching for the meaning of らば, or how to say “if” in japanese, I don’t find anything about it. Just なら , or なら(ば).
Thank you.
3 comments
振れば.
It’s 振れば.
[～ば](https://nihongokyoshi-net.com/2020/07/06/jlptn4-grammar-ba) is the conditional in this situation and connects with the e-vowel base form
edit: having said that, there may be a bit of old Japanese involved, so a different vowel is used, but ～ば is still the conditional.
It’s an old form of ~えば (あば/わば). In modern japanese it would be 振れば
Is there actually a rule for “if” in Japanese?
In English, there are four conditionals depending on the situation but in Japanese there doesn’t really seem to be a specific rule…I just use alternate between them. 😅