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Okay so I ran across this sentence in Tae Kim’s grammar guide and I don’t get it at all.
友達に会えれば、買い物に行きます。
What I don’t understand is why does 会う is conjugated into 会えれば and not 会えば。Is it a mistake or am I misunderstanding something. 全く分かりません。
My take on this is the following:
The translation Tae Kim gives for the sentence 友達に会えれば、買い物に行きます is “If I can meet with my friend, we will go shopping.”
“can meet” means the potential form is probably used here. So 会う gets conjugated to 会える then as Tae Kim states “For verbs: Change the last /u/ vowel sound to the equivalent /e/ vowel sound and attach 「ば」”. So 会える gets conjugated to 会えれば (If I can meet)Yeah, it can sometimes be tricky to tell what’s going on when multiple conjugations are being applied at once. I concur with trout, though – it’s the conditional of the potential.
Oh, duuuh. This sentence has been bothering me for 3 months. I review my grammar lessons from everywhere (Genki, Tae Kim’s Guide, TextFugu) every two weeks or so to drill them in and I could not figure that sentence out no matter matter how many times I looked at it.
Thanks a lot!!! I probably would’ve never figured it out on my own.
http://www.imabi.net/ is another good place for grammar.
Multiple conjugations always tend to throw me off too, especially those involving ～たい, like 食べたくなかった. Also, getting confused between ～なった（なる）and ～なかった（ない）is really frustrating too, like 早くなった which my brain just fails to read properly :P
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