@Daigo
All fixed 
Cheers!
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I’m a little confused about the intentional/non intentional forms.
In item る - Verbs［ない・ません］ - Japanese Grammar Explained | Bunpro ‘る-Verb (Negative)’, it says:
*These nuances are ‘don’t’ (usually not), ‘won’t’ (intentionally not), or ‘can’t’ (unintentionally not). * but doesn’t clarify which one is which. Then it lists an example of ない as unintentional, and ません as intentional.
in item う - Verbs［ない・ません］ - Japanese Grammar Explained | Bunpro ‘う-Verb (Negative)’, it says the same info, then gives an example of ない as intentional, and ません as unintentional. Very confusing.
I then thought the take home message was ‘both can be used for both and it depends on context and tone’ but during the test 車はもちません (won’t), only one option is accepted it seems?
I’m a bit confused. One of the SRS questions is:
“I don’t wake up early. The negative form of a single-conjugation verb, in either its polite or casual variant.”
The answer it’s looking for is:
おきないです
Why is there a です at the end? The details section of the ru verb negative grammar point says nothing on using desu. The examples page shows, e.g, taberu being conjugated as:
tabenai
tabenaidesu
tabermasenn
But I’m not sure why in this case 起きません was marked as a wrong answer. (Update: I’m wrong, it’s not a wrong answer, I must have made some other mistake, but I still don’t know why it would have a desu in it.)
I just took a look and this is true that its not in the Details section, but it does show in the “Structure” section under “Polite” form. Did the review specifically ask for casual or polite form? Most reviews will ask for one or the other, so if it was asking for polite it would either be おきないです or おきません. If it was asking for casual form then おきない would be the answer. If it says it will accept either casual or polite then it should accept all three.
Why do we need to add “desu” to the “nai” casual form but not to the "ません” version?
I understand that “desu” effectively makes “nai” polite, but doesn’t “desu” essentially mean it “is” something? Is the “is” part implicit in the casual “nai”? Why do we not need it in the more polite version? Does "ません” explicitly conjugate desu in some way?
Sorry for the newbie question.
です is a bit special. It used to be a copula similar to だ or である or でございます, and if it was just that it could indeed not be used after ない for the same reason why it can’t be used after -ません. But in modern Japanese, です (and only です) has a secondary usage where it has no grammatical purpose, and only acts as a “politeness particle”. When we say something like ないです, we’re only making ない more polite. The です isn’t doing any of the things that a copula would otherwise do in a sentence where it’s used as a copula, and it doesn’t add any “is”-like meaning. It only expresses politeness towards the person we’re talking with, similar to what ます/ません does.
There are a few other cases where です can be used in this “politeness particle” form even when it’s not grammatical as a copula, e.g. after い-adjectives (おいしいです) , but since it adds politeness, this doesn’t happen with expressions that are already polite, such as verbs in the -ます/-ません form.
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Thank you so much for the thorough explanation!
Think this topic requires more explanation on the differences between “naidesu” and “masen”. It’s not really explained why you’d use one over the other.
Think this topic requires more explanation on the differences between “naidesu” and “masen”. It’s not really explained why you’d use one over the other.
Bumping this thread because this is my question too. The main item does say that the nuance difference between -ないです and -ません is that the former seems to indicate “unintentionally not” and the latter “intentionally not.”
But is this the exhaustive explanation? The example sentences don’t really clear things up.
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Hi!
If you read the grammar point carefully, it always speaks about -ない (casual) and -ません (polite). Actually, -ないです (another possibility for polite, perfectly explained by @nekoyama here) is not mentioned anywhere in the grammar point but only in the usage box in the upper left.
Further to this, the several nuances referred to are applicable to the negative form as such, irrespective of the level of language. As usual, it all boils down to context.
(The example sentences are unfortunate, though, as one is casual and the other polite so that it is easy to imply that casual = unintentional and polite = intentional, which is not the case. I guess these are the source of the misunderstanding.)
HTH!
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Here to say that I also found this explanation and the examples unhelpful and potentially misleading. I still have no idea what dictates whether a negative form of a verb is intentional or not, but I almost got tricked into thinking that somehow polite/casual form might be a factor even though that didn’t make much sense to me.
I tried looking at a few of the additional resource pages linked at the bottom and didn’t find any mention at all of what indicates intentional/unintentional. Maybe it’s mentioned in one of the videos that were linked, but I prefer reading/scanning over waiting through a 15+ minute video to see if my question is even answered. A citation might be useful here.
Even just the addition of “Whether a negative form verb is interpreted as intentional or not is entirely dependent on context not covered here,” would be helpful in stopping folks from trying to make meaning from the two example sentences that isn’t there.