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I was going through the page in season five about what was expected. Two of the example sentences and their translations are:
すし を たべる はず だ (I expect to eat sushi) and すし を たべた はず だった (I expected to eat sushi). I think I’m confused about what it means when the verb before はず is in the past tense. I would have thought the second sentence meant something like “I expected to have eaten sushi.” I thought “expected to eat sushi” would be “すし を たべる はず だった.”
Any clarification would be greatly appreciated.
Looking it up on ALC, they’ve translated 「～するはずだった」as “be supposed to”, which is a common thread of most of their examples. When it comes down to it, it’s just the past of having an expectation of the clause before it, to have been sure that it was going to happen, so “be supposed to” is a nice, natural way of saying it in English; that must be a common translation, I’m guessing.
I’d say that “すし を たべる はず だった.” means “I was supposed to eat sushi”
ALC has 「～するはずだ」as being “be expected to”, which when you compare it with the past form mentioned above makes sense. If it ends with だ, there is a current expectation that said thing will happen, while if it ends with だった, sometime in the past there *was* an expectation for events to turn out that way.
As for ”すし を たべた はず だった”, to be honest, I’m not sure. There really aren’t many examples on either jisho or ALC. While there were no examples on jisho that had BOTH past forms at once, all the (four) examples with the first part past and the ending non-past have as translations things along the lines of “should have” and “ought to have”, so maybe you can extrapolate from there. It really doesn’t look that common a construction.
Not a definitive answer, but hopefully it helps and/or someone else can shed some more light on it :)
The way Japanese treats tenses is a little bit different to how English does it, and can be a little bit hard to explain when you look at it in detail. Simply put, when talking about some past event, your feelings/thoughts/whatever about that event that you felt at the time are also past tense – rather like ありがとうございました. So:
(Gonna change the contextualised pronoun to “you”, because some of the translations sound stupid when it’s “I”.)
すしを食べるはずだ = I expect you’ll eat sushi (at some point in the future)
すしを食べるはずだった = I had expected you would eat sushi (but I guess not, since you seem to be walking into the ramen shop instead)
すしを食べたはずだ = I expect you’ve eaten sushi (at some point in the past)
すしを食べたはずだった = I had expected you’d eaten sushi (but you’ve just told me you ate something else instead)
Thank you both. That is more or less what I thought. Could there be a typo in the example from Textfugu?
There could be. Typos are not unheard-of in TextFugu, which is why there’s a “bounty” button at the bottom of every page. =)
Huh. So that’s what that is. I just submitted it. I’ll wait and see what happens. ありがとうございます！
@vanandrew: http://www.alc.co.jp/
It’s all in Japanese, but all you have to do is type the word in the box (Japanese OR English, I think) and hit enter. Lots of good example sentences. From what I’ve heard, it’s a good resource for translators since… well, it’s probably easier if you just try using it and see what it’s like :DThanks Mr!
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