I’m having trouble with this concept. As quoted from the Nihongo Now Level 2 V. 1 textbook,
“When the subject of the Sentence Modifier preceding つもり is not the same as the subject of the main clause, つもり indicates an assumption.”
Below, it lists, “あちらが先生のつもりだったけど。” translated as “I assumed it was the professor over there, but…”
I’m having trouble understanding how to parse sentences like this. In the listening practice, I can’t differentiate between these ‘intention’ and ‘assumption’ statements at all. Isn’t the subject of the main clause implied in most sentences? In the above example, without the translation, I might think they were discussing the Professor’s plan. How can I tell these two functions of つもり apart?
3 comments
I’m not so sure how to process the explanation of your textbook, but here’s my understanding:
[Quoting](https://wildnihongo.com/grammar/tsumori/)
>When paired with a noun, the interpretation of つもり depends on context (“I intend for X to be a Y” or “I am convinced that X is Y“).
nounのつもり, i.e. 先生のつもり can express intention as in “wanting to be a teacher”, but that doesn’t work well the context of あちら.
It *could* express that someone distant wants in fact to be a teacher. But this has the caveat that you usually cannot know third parties’ intentions, so つもり can’t be used like this. You really would need to know, or you’d need to be close to the person, or you’d have to add らしい, とおもう etc.
So your sentence much more likely expresses the speakers’ assumption.
Either way 先生のつもり does not mean “the professor’s plan”
____
*Intention*つもり mainly works with verbs, and sometimes with nouns as described above.
Note that the verbs are in the non-past form, and that tense of these statements is determined by the tense of だ・です.
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*Assumption* (usually of something that actually isn’t the case) on the other hand works with verbs, adjectives and nouns/noun phrases.
If used with verbs, the verb is always in the past form; while だ・です still determines the overall tense of the statement.
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That covers all the bases for me.
Don’t try to distinguish the words, try to unify the concepts.
If someone who is good at communicating in Japanese feels that it’s important to make the distinction, they’ll choose words more precisely, like 意図(いと) vs 筈(はず)。
The book is telling you about a pattern but doing a bad job of it:
> In good style, subordinate-clause つもり tells you about the state of mind of the main subject.
So if the main subject is myself, then I can’t be talking about the professor’s intent, I’m telling you about what’s going on in my mind. I wanted to think that person was the professor, but…
However, this is *only clear in context.* In general Japanese gets harder to understand the more you dissect it into separate phrases.
Also it’s the kind of rule that might be broken by accident or in bad style. Tracking subjects across multiple clauses is something that people can do subconsciously, but it’s relatively easy to make mistakes about that kind of thing.
In addition to what the other person said, つもり cannot be used as a noun meaning “(someone’s) plan”, in the sense of “Here is my plan to become a teacher” or “This document describes his plan.”