What Do You Want?
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!” - Henry David Thoreau
a Nom nom nom nom. I want a hamburger. I want to eat a hamburger. These are two of many things you’ll know how to say by the end of this chapter. Not only will you learn how to tell people what you want (and want to do), you’ll learn how to do it directly and indirectly (an important thing to know how to do in Japanese).
We’ll be covering two different grammar forms for “to want.” Although in English we just use the word “want” both times for when we “want something” versus when we “want to do something,” in Japanese there’s two different ways to do this.
ほしい – for when you want something
〜たい Form – for when you want to do something
The reason you’re learning these now is because they reinforce what you learned with both verbs and adjectives, and they also have you practice adjectives conjugation (which you learned in the previous chapter). You’ll get lots of reinforcement and review, but you’ll also be learning how to do something new, getting the best of both worlds!
Let’s get started with the verb form, since it’s been a while since we’ve looked at verbs together.