Past form

You say ‘atsukatta desu.’ to mean it was hot. But why can’t you say ‘atsui deshita’?

3 comments
  1. Why can’t you you say “I saw he this morning” in English?

    Because language, ya numpty.

  2. Because 暑い is an adjective and you show the past tense of it by changing it into 暑かった and then you can add です if it’s needed.

    (I’m aware not all adjectives work like this, but it’s how 暑い works)

  3. Japanese -i adjectives are kind of “verb-y” in that they don’t need a word for “to be” to show things like tense and negation, the same way a verb like たべる doesn’t (you wouldn’t say たべるです). The reason です is used after -i adjectives is to create the polite form. You can think of this as the -i adjective version of the ます ending for verbs – -i adjectives don’t have ます forms, so they use です instead.

    This means that the tense is still shown in the adjective itself:
    あつい → あつかった

    But if you were to make the polite form, you just add です to the end regardless of the tense:
    あついです → あつかったです

Leave a Reply
You May Also Like