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Vocabulary/Translations - past tense/future tense - Language Exchange

Category: Vocabulary/Translations
Discussion: past tense/future tense

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233326

past tense/future tense
would anyone know how to make a phrase past tense or future tense in japanese? i’ve been struggling with this recently, and i’d like to learn how. i am a native speaker in english, and would like some help with figuring this out. thank you for your possible help

Language pair: English; Japanese

Laney
(i do not wish to give my name out)
November 4, 2017

233336

Re: past tense/future tense in Japanese
Hi Laney,

you might find the English Wikipedia page on Japanese verb conjugations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_verb_conjugation) to be helpful. It looks like the Japanese imperfective aspect would generally be used to express the English future tense (note that it’s also generally used to express the English present tense, so context would determine which tense is intended), and the Japanese perfective aspect would generally be used to express the English past tense.

Note that there isn’t a one-to-one mapping between tense and aspect; for example, in English, the progressive aspect can be expressed with any tense — the past progressive (e.g. “I was eating”), the present progressive (e.g. “I am eating”), and the future progressive (e.g. “I shall be eating”).

Language pair: English; Japanese
This is a reply to message # 233326

Chris
November 6, 2017

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