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Hi, this is probably something extremely trivial but I just can’t seem to grasp it! I wrote an entry on Lang-8 and a couple of users corrected me on this:
(XXX)を読んでいません。 Instead of: (XXX)を読みません。
I don’t understand why 読む is conjugated like that. Help!
It is probably beyond your current level, but you can read more on it here
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/teform
In the future, please refer to this thread when asking these kind of questions.
http://www.textfugu.com/bb/topic/the-i-found-some-japanese-i-dont-understand-thread/
If you already know about te-form and are just asking why it should be 飲んでいません instead of 飲みません, it depends on what you were trying to say, what the context is i.e. what the (XXX) part is.
Aye, context is everything in Japanese. If you’re querying us about a correction or translation, but only post half the sentence, chances are you’ve lopped off the bits that make the most difference. =)
Hi. Sorry about that. This is what I wrote after it was corrected to (apparently) te-form
まだたくさんの課を読んでいません,
But I didn’t know about the te-form, so reading from that link to Tae-Kim’s blog given above kind of helped a little..
まだ本を読んでいません = I still haven’t read the book
まだ本を読みません = I won’t read the book for a while
The technical definition of まだ is “some state that existed in the past still remains” – which you translate as “still” or “yet”. In the first sentence, the state of “not having read the book” is still present now (読んでいない), while in the second sentence, the state will be continuing for the foreseeable future (読まない).
When you use たくさん, “still haven’t” is pretty much the only usage that makes sense, so 読んでいない.
And I’m hoping that explanation didn’t just confuse matters further. =P
Thanks! That explains a lot!
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