Presumptive and Past presumptive

What is the difference?

Taberu - Eat
Tabemashite iru - Is Eating
Tabeta - Ate
Tabemashite ita - Was eating
Tabemaseru - Could/can/able to eat

My understanding of presumptive is it translates to more or less..

Trying/try to eat
Shall eat
About to eat
Lets eat

But which of these would fall into presumptive or past presumptive? They seem to all be present tense.. Or would the past presumptive literally mean "was about to eat", "was trying to eat" etc.. and in that case shall and lets would only be normal presumptive. Hope this isnt to confusing but books are ****!

I'm not sure what presumptive or past presumptive tense means, but for your tenses they should be:
tabete iru - Is Eating
tabete ita - Was eating
tabe rareru - could/can/able to eat (also passive tense)

As for translations of what you wrote, I would say
tabe you to shiteiru 食べようとしている
taberu tsumori/tabeyou 食べるつもり/食べよう
taberu tokoro/toko 食べるところ/とこ
tabemashou/tabeyou 食べましょう/食べよう

but I could be wrong.

I wouldn't worry about cataloging things into words like "presumptive", "past presumptive", "past participle", "predicative adjectives", "reciprocal pronouns", etc. Just understand the meaning of the grammar. It will save you lots of headaches and allow you to learn the language more naturally in my opinion.

Half-n-Half said:

I'm not sure what presumptive or past presumptive tense means, but for your tenses they should be:
tabete iru - Is Eating
tabete ita - Was eating
tabe rareru - could/can/able to eat (also passive tense)

As for translations of what you wrote, I would say
tabe you to shiteiru 食べようとしている
taberu tsumori/tabeyou 食べるつもり/食べよう
taberu tokoro/toko 食べるところ/とこ
tabemashou/tabeyou 食べましょう/食べよう

but I could be wrong.

I wouldn't worry about cataloging things into words like "presumptive", "past presumptive", "past participle", "predicative adjectives", "reciprocal pronouns", etc. Just understand the meaning of the grammar. It will save you lots of headaches and allow you to learn the language more naturally in my opinion.

Click to expand...

I always thought progressive was Tabete iru and recently drilled into myself that its mashite iru because the conjugation table I have says differently hmm...

You repeated the same mistake again.
https://jref.com/forum/learning-japanese-64/do-these-look-right-48202/
Do these look right? | Japan Forum

non-polite
present: 食べる
past: 食べた
present progressive: 食べている
past progressive: 食べていた
potential: 食べられる
past potential: 食べられた

polite
present: 食べます
past: 食べました
present progressive: 食べています
past progressive: 食べていました
potential: 食べられます
past potential: 食べられました


Where did you get the term "presumptive" from?

Conjugation of Japanese verb taberu - to eat

Hmm I was using this but the TE form is back properly now. When I checked it yesterday it had mashite in progressive/continious both tenses but now not.. Sometimes the site messes up the conjugations when you type stems in manually but seems I was right about te iru all along. Anyway te is all cleared up but aside from that this "presumptive verb" business is confusing me mainly because it has a present and past tense. The presumptive is distinct from the potential form.

Probably "presumptive" refers to 推量形, i.e., "guess form". It's OK just to add the suffix だろう(non-polite) or でしょう(polite) to the non-polite conclusive form.

non-polite
present: 食べるだろう
past: 食べただろう
present progressive: 食べているだろう
past progressive: 食べていただろう
potential: 食べられるだろう
past potential: 食べられただろう

polite
present: 食べるでしょう
past: 食べたでしょう
present progressive: 食べているでしょう
past progressive: 食べていたでしょう
potential: 食べられるでしょう
past potential: 食べられたでしょう

食べよう indeed can mean "guess", but it's a bit classical and basically used in idiomatic usages in modern Japanese.
(I can't understand why the conjugator doesn't give the negative forms 食べなかろう, 食べなかったろう, 食べていない, 食べていなかった in the table.)

I think mabye I need to stop using the conjugator I use it to find all the verb forms for each verb then spend ages learning them until I can use them in sentences effectively and apparently they arent even right.. Also I've posted another thread like this before and it seems many people dont have a clue what potential, presumptive, conditional, provisional etc forms mean or they call them something completely different. My dictionary and every dictionary online is useless it gives the basic conjugations for present, continious, past, negatives of them and all the different politeness levels but finding out how to say things like could eat, shall eat, can eat, lets eat, trying to eat etc, because they are "tabe attachments" if you see what I'm saying. I'm only using eat as any example as its a very easy verb to conjugate into the various forms.

Edit: I'm not calling anyone stupid for not knowing what I'm talking about with the above terms. Most people who post are a lot more proficient than me so if the terms arent making sense they are more than likely wrong.. Which is something I need to try and figure out.

The reasnon we couldn't understand what "presumptive" refers to is quite simple. The word is not a common translation of the Japanese grammar term. I've never heard "presumptive" before. The answer to your question -Why the sites/dictionaries use the terms potential, causative, passive or like that instaed of "can do", "make do", "be done"?- is also quite simple. The traslations of those forms are not always fixed. The meanings could change depending on the context. For instance, 食べよう, the volitional form of 食べる, doesn't always mean "Let's eat". It might be "I shall eat", or could be "I think someone will eat". You should learn them in the real context instead of the conjugation tables, as HnH-san adviced. In the first place, what's the sense of remembering the forms you don't know even the meanings of?