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日本語 Nihongo
Learning Japanese
Saying "I have/have not (done that)"
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<blockquote data-quote="Majestic" data-source="post: 794164" data-attributes="member: 61235"><p>Another way to look at this is: why do we have such a thing as <em>present-perfect</em> tense in English in the first place? What is the difference between</p><p><em>I didn't eat lunch</em></p><p><em>I haven't eaten lunch</em></p><p>They actually mean the same thing. The only difference is a subtle inference that you may still eat lunch at some point in the future. But it is just a subtle difference, and neither sentence negates the possibility that you still might eat lunch at some point. </p><p></p><p>So going back to your original question, you are almost saying: how can I force the Japanese language to conform to the English template that is in my head? The answer is; get rid of the template, because it only hinders your progress. </p><p>Did you eat my lunch?</p><p>No I did not? </p><p>is the basic structure you should be looking for. If you throw a sentence with a present-perfect tense into a language that has no present-perfect tense, your outcome will always puzzle you until you realize the present-perfect tense was the source of the problem, not the Japanese outcome.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Majestic, post: 794164, member: 61235"] Another way to look at this is: why do we have such a thing as [I]present-perfect[/I] tense in English in the first place? What is the difference between [I]I didn't eat lunch I haven't eaten lunch[/I] They actually mean the same thing. The only difference is a subtle inference that you may still eat lunch at some point in the future. But it is just a subtle difference, and neither sentence negates the possibility that you still might eat lunch at some point. So going back to your original question, you are almost saying: how can I force the Japanese language to conform to the English template that is in my head? The answer is; get rid of the template, because it only hinders your progress. Did you eat my lunch? No I did not? is the basic structure you should be looking for. If you throw a sentence with a present-perfect tense into a language that has no present-perfect tense, your outcome will always puzzle you until you realize the present-perfect tense was the source of the problem, not the Japanese outcome. [/QUOTE]
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日本語 Nihongo
Learning Japanese
Saying "I have/have not (done that)"
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