Hey there 
After learning ~ては halfway across N2, I realized I lost complete track of all the possible ways to express “if” and their nunaces. I think reading/listening might be just okay but I’m afraid I’d end up using only ば when talking, out of fear of getting the worst nunace lol
Anyway the point is, did someone ever bother to list all the grammars(or at least most common ones) to use and ‘if…then’ structure in Japanese that they won’t mind sharing?
Thank you!
I probably will forget some, but here’s a list for now:
もしも～なら https://bunpro.jp/grammar_points/もしも～なら・もしも～でも
Maybe some of them are a stretch, but there you go. I’m sure others will add more to this list.
I’m only halfway through the list posted above, and I was getting overwhelmed because the nuance is not going through my skull, I will bookmark and def come back to this frequently haha
The best way to understand them is with LOTS of exposure, so don’t feel bad if they don’t stick. IMO, the first 4 are the hardest to grasp, since they have very specific conditions for them to be grammatically correct. Here’s a link you can check out:
I’m not sure how helpful that’ll be because there are a lot of things to consider when using each conditional, as you will see, but there you go.
HTH!
That’s where I’m currently at.
Very interesting, it still sounds a bit technical to me but probably because I haven’t seen enough examples yet to really grasp all the conditions. I’ll keep coming back to it until it makes sense, thanks for sharing!
Two of those that I find easier to reason about:
と also means “and”, giving a very strong equivalence. A と B means that A and B go together hand-in-hand. So you should only use it if you mean that A will necessarily lead to B. “if I don’t go to bed right now, I won’t get enough sleep”.
たら can usually (although not always) be translated as “when”. “If/when you’re hungry, there are leftovers in the fridge”. You can also see that in such an example と would make no sense, since it would imply that every time you get hungry there are leftovers in the fridge.
ば and なら give me more trouble because I can’t quite as easily map their meaning to a simple concept.
Yeah this is definitely what I was looking for! Although I have to say they are roughly double what I expected them to be hahaha
Thank you!
There are a few more, I just got lazy and didn’t try to find them lol.