Ba, nara, tara, to summing up

4 comments

1. I think

   – the 1st #1 is more likely to happen. It’s not hypothetical or speculation. (If the customer comes in please greet them.)
   –
   お客様が店に入ったら挨拶して下さい。

   – The 4th #1 is hypothetical (If civilization collapses what will you do?)
   –
   社会が崩ればどうする？

   – the 2nd #1 is more a sequence than “if” (The light turns green, ***then*** you go as fast as you can)

   信号が青くなって出来るだけ速く行ってください。

   – the 3rd #1 is emphasizing the “IF”. Like (IF you do X for me I’ll do Y for you.) The situation hinges on this big “IF”.

   今日残業をしてくれるなら明日休んで良いよ。

   Why the hell can’t you count to 4?

   I’m not Japanese. Just a guy who’s lived here a fairly long while. I still make mistakes.

2. English second conditional is “If I x’ed, I would y”. ぇば is not that, and I would caution generally against trying to map things to the English conditionals, which are awkwardly named (srsly i would really like to tell off the person who named them first, second, third) and quite specific to the language. But I’ll come back to it because there’s a specific construction in Japanese that’s roughly equivalent.

   Anyway, with this type of thing you need examples. The stupider the better. I think some of what you wrote is correct, but the thing you wrote with “aka to, tara”, that’s not useful in the slightest.

   * あのカバンを買ったら、そこに行く
   * あのカバンを買うと、そこに行く
   * あのカバンを買えば、そこに行く
   * あのカバンを買うなら、そこに行く

   They all basically mean “If you buy that bag, I will come there”. と has the strongest sense of one happening after and specifically because the other happened, so you could translate it “once” or “when” instead. たら has a sense like after as well, or as soon as one thing happens the other will too. You can also use it for actions that might have happened in the past. ば is probably the most neutral translation of “if”.

   なら is a bit more complicated because it is also an inflected form of だ so it can be used as-is after nouns as well as verbs, in which case it has a sense like “speaking of” or “if it’s…” or “in the case of”. In the above example it would be like, more specifically I would only come there if you bought the thing.

   So you could maybe translate:
   * Once you’ve bought that bag, I will come there
   * When you buy that bag, i will come there
   * If you buy that bag, I will come there
   * I will come there but only if you buy the bag

   Also, もし means “if”. So if you put that at the start of a sentence it strengthens a conditional reading of the sentence.

   As for english second conditional, you do that with one of these if constructions *and* a following verb in the past tense. So our sentence would be 〜買ったら、行った. “I would go if you bought it.” Not much to choose between たら and ば here. You’ll also see it most often as 〜買ったらよかった – literally “it would be good if you bought it” but would be translated as “You should have bought it”. The other thing is it’s more of the English *third* conditional than second, “I would have gone if you had bought it.” Again this is where trying to squeeze categories of one language into the other becomes a problem.

   Sentence examples with a noun:
   * 車なら速い – It’s quick by car (it’s quick if you’re in a car/in the case of cars)
   * 警察ならドーナツが好きだ – If you’re a policeman you like donuts / As for policeman, they like donuts. (you might notice i have a habit of using なら as a stronger version of は)
   * 警察だったらドーナツが好きだ – compared to the last one this is more “If you *were* a policeman you *would* like donuts”, so the counterfactual/second conditional.
   * 警察だとドーナツが好きになる – again と has a sense of one happening after the other so it would have to be “If you’re a policeman/When you become a policeman you start liking donuts”

3. [https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/rmrgfq/japanese_conditionals/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/rmrgfq/japanese_conditionals/)

4. Thank you. I’m studying this rn as well.