If you want to use present perfect in Japanese, you will need to use the so called "ta-form" of the verbs. As for the detailed answer, in the following few paragraphs, I will show you a special usage of the simple Japanese past tense. Later on you will need this structure many times, as such I recommend you to understand it as much as possible.
If you want to use present perfect in Japanese, you will need to use the so called "ta-form" of the verbs
The person (especially if he or she is Japanese) is usually interested in what you have done in the past. For instance you will be asked several times if you have been to Japan, if you have read manga or if you have drunk sake. In these cases the existence or the non-existence of the given action is important as opposed to the action itself. As such you will need to modify the simple past tense form a bit.
The following teaching material will be about this modification and I will also give you a few examples. I believe this structure is very important in Japanese. This is especially true if you are in Japan, or you are talking to a Japanese person. These are the cases when it comes handy if you can talk about things that you have done in the past. This helps your partner to form an approximate image of your character and he won't take you to a sushi restaurant to guide you around if you have already been there.
As I have already mentioned, you will need the so-called ta-form when creating present perfect tense in Japanese. You can find these rules in a previous material, and here is a short review as well:
For example:
For example:
At this point I suppose you can conjugate Japanese verbs into their simple past tense form. The next step is to emphasize that these actions (facts) indeed happened in the past (or not). The word "fact" can be expressed in the following two ways in Japanese:
I advise you to learn these words with the corresponding kanjis. Later, if you only know their hiragana writing it is pretty easy to misuse them.
In this case, since we are stating or negating the existing of an abstract fact, we will need to use the word こと「事」. If this is clear for you, you are able to create nouns out of verbs:
The last step is to state or negate the existence of these facts. You can do it in a simple (not polite, direct) form, by attaching がある or a がない to the end of the sentence. As for the previous examples:
This English translation would sound a bit odd if I neglected the personal pronouns, but keep in mind that there is no personal pronoun in the Japanese expressions. The Japanese expressions would be complete (corresponding to the English translations) if I used personal pronouns, which is often omitted by the speaker (if it is obvious).
Read more >> How to conjugate Japanese conditional form
These expressions, in their simple form can be used, when you are talking to your friends or a person, who is "socially equal to you" in the given situation. This is indeed very difficult to judge... If this is not the case, you will need to make your speech more polite, otherwise you might sound very rude. This can be achieved by changing ある to あります and ない to ありません at the end of the sentences.
If this is all clear, I would like to show you three simple sentences that are used very often when you are communicating in Japan. These sentences already include personal pronouns and are in a honorific form.
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Finally let's see how to create questions out of these sentences. In this case you can simply attach a か at the end of the sentences, which will turn them into questions in Japanese.
These questions are already in a polite form, so feel free to use them when you are talking to your Japanese boss or professor.
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