Conjugating たい and ほしい

“Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.” - Mark Twain

The great thing about both of these “want” words is that they both conjugate the same way. ほしい conjugates just like an い adjective (because, well, it is an い adjective). たい form also conjugates like an い adjective, meaning they’re both the same. The fact that they both have to do with “wanting” makes this even easier to remember.

Let’s review い adjective conjugation (you should know this by now, but just making sure…)

い
present / future

くない
negative

かった
past

くなかった
past negative

With these, all you’re doing is taking the い and changing it to one of the other things. With both ほしい and たい, you have an い on the end. To conjugate them, you just take that い and change it to the above things.

a たべたい
Want to eat

a たべたくない
Don’t want to eat

a たべたかった
Wanted to eat

a たべたくなかった
Did not want to eat

With ほしい, it’s the same thing. Can you conjugate ほしい into the four different tenses?

Present/future →

Past Negative →

Past →

Negative →

As long as you knew い adjective conjugation, this page should have been a cinch for you. You’re still learning new things, but technically you knew them already. Funny how that works out :)

Also just like い adjectives, to be polite you’ll need to end these all with です (no matter if it’s past, negative, or past negative tense). So:

たべたい　です
たべたくない　です
たべたかった　です
たべたくなかった　です

ほしい　です
ほしくない　です
ほしかった　です
ほしくなかった　です

If you need to review your い adjective conjugation, you should. If you don’t, you should move on to the next page where you’ll really start to use these things.

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