I remember reading there are differences in when to use the past and present tense in Japanese (which I totally forgot). I recently came across the sentence 「意外に早かったわね」, which in the translation was written as “You’re faster than you look.” The Japanese sentence is in the past tense, and the English tense is written in the present tense. I was wondering what the different rules governing these tenses and how they are different from English.
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i might be wrong so dont take it from me, but it think the translator just took some liberties to make the meaning of the sentence more clear. I think translated completely literally it would mean “You were unexpectedly fast”, but if the translator may have translated it in a way that reads better in english or fits better with the rest of the paragraph
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Bad old answer
There are many directions to take this but one idea that popped into my mind is something like this. If you said this sentence in a polite form it could be:
早かったですね。It is that you were fast.
早かったでしたね。It was that you were fast.
In the casual register that nuance is unspecified.
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Perhaps it was translated by a human, so that would make sense.
Makes sense, Thanks!
I don’t think 早かったでしたね is a correct sentence in Japanese. The copula here serves no other purpose than politeness and therefore as far as my textbook knowledge goes it can be only 早かったですね.
As for the question, I also think the translator took many liberties here, and not only regarding the verb but also the adverb. This actually happens a lot of the time and not only in JP->EN cases, but both ways.
Edit. @grahamw are you sure you saw it regarding plain present and past tenses and not the so-called continuous form of ている though? The only thing I can think of is that Japanese doesn’t strictly have present tense, just non-past tense. I do however know that the ている and ていた are extremely stinky and I gave up any form of trying to understand them. One example I was given in the past was ピアノが落ちている, which means that the piano has fallen and not is falling… Maybe this is what you meant?
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You are right that its not something that make sense.
I did not really get out the point that I was trying to get at. Haha
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Hi, I agree that this would be the right translation, with the addition that the わ particle seems to convey a feeling of emotion or admiration, as I learned today. So I guess the translation would be “Wow! You were unexpectedly fast, weren’t you!?”.
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Incidentally I was reading the wiktionary page for です earlier today and it addresses this:
For the past tense of an -i adjective, the adjective + でした (deshita) is nonstandard and generally considered a common grammatical mistake made by non-native speakers. The standard form is instead to use the past form of the -i adjective + です (desu). For the forms ないです (nai desu) and なかったです (nakatta desu), there are synonyms ありません (arimasen) and ありませんでした (arimasen deshita).
I suppose that it makes sense since this particular usage of です is really peculiar since it’s, as far as I know, purely a politeness marker and not the usual copula. After all only です can be used in these constructions and never だ (at least in “standard” Japanese).
And this use of です has only become accepted in formal Japanese in the 2nd half of the 20th century (and I think to this day some Japanese speakers consider it clunky in very formal contexts).
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If this is a quote from a manga/video game/light novel or something similar I wouldn’t read too much into the わ necessarily, it can be simple 役割語 that’s here more to give some flair to the sentence than to carry any strong semantic meaning.
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This brought to my mind this lesson from Tae Kim’s Guide to Learning Japanese. Pray go down to the 「です」 is NOT the same as 「だ」 section.
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I remember that take (I used Tae Kim and Cure Dolly a lot early in my studies, and they approach that だ/です discussion from very different angles). I don’t think either of them are wrong, they’re just two different models with pros and cons, but I must say that I’m on team Cure Dolly here and in my mental model I consider です to be formal だ with a special exception as a politeness marker for い adjectives.
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We’ve spiraled from the core thread cause of my mistake haha. To add to this idea I hear this い形容詞+です all the time. It also is really common in the ~ない+です.
I originally was thinking more about the fact that Japanese doesn’t distinguish between true past tense and completion/perfect aspect in verbs. My curiosity was if this applies to adjectives as well.
e.g
The building has been built.
この建物が建っている。
The building had been built.
この建物は建っていた。
So 早かった could in some cases be more like had been quick. Rather than just was quick. And in that case it may make sense when taking into account the information of the particles it ends up more appropriately translated to what it was above.
I tried to tease out this idea and instead fell into another hole!
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These differences are always interesting, but I also note that often these things only become remarkable when you actually try to translate from one language into another and you realize that there was an ambiguity you never noticed when just reading the original. That certainly happens extremely often when translating Japanese into English.
It’s not limited to that though of course, for instance an English sentence like “when I was a kid, I ate natto” is absolutely fine I think, but if I have to translate it into my native French I hit a bit of an issue because I need to know if this was a punctual event (“I ate natto once during a trip to Japan”) or if it was an habitual thing (“I ate natto every day because my mother loved it and made it fresh”) because in French we would use different conjugations for “I ate” in this case (“je mangeais”/imperfect or “j’ai mangé”/perfect).
Anyway, I don’t know why I ramble about French, I should do my reviews instead…
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