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Lesson 31: The ば Conditional

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Today we're going to talk about the conditional -ba/-reba.

Last week we looked at the -to conditional and we saw that its particular characteristic was its exclusiveness, its implication that only one outcome is possible.

In many cases we can use any or most of the conditionals without changing the meaning to any great extent, but each conditional has its own particular qualities.

So today we're going to look at the special quality of -ba/-reba and some of the things it does and why it does them.

First of all, what is -ba/-reba?

-Ba/-reba is a helper which we put on to the e-stem of a verb.

The e-stem is one of the lesser used stems but -ba /-reba is one of the things that uses it.

So, for godan verbs we put it on to the e-stem and for ichidan verbs, as always, we simply put it on to .... we simply take off the -ru and add the ichidan form, -reba.

For the two irregular verbs, in this case they work exactly like regular ichidan verbs.

So "kuru" becomes "ku-reba" and "suru" becomes "su-reba".

Actually, "kuru" and "suru", I would say, are in fact ichidan verbs, but they're strong ichidan verbs.

A strong verb is a verb that can change its vowel sound.

In English we have "come" and "came", "eat and "ate".

And "kuru" and "suru" in some cases change their vowel sound.

"Kuru" in the negative becomes "konai", "suru" becomes "shinai".

But in this case they don't change their vowel sound at all, so that's very simple -- they just work like the ichidan verbs that they fundamentally are.

For adjectives, we take off the -i and use the helper -kereba.

You might notice that when we do anything with an adjective other than simply take off the -i and add whatever we're going to add, the specific adjectival modifications all come from the ka-ki-ku-ke-ko row.

So, the negative of an adjective is -kunai ("omoshiroi" --> "omoshiro-kunai"); the past is -katta ("omoshiroi" --> "omoshiro-katta"); and the -ba conditional is -kereba ("omoshiroi" --> "omoshiro-kereba").

So in a way we could say that if adjectives had an e-stem, it would be -ke.

And that's what we use in that case.

So what's the special characteristic of -ba/-reba?

-To, as we know, its special characteristic is its exclusiveness.

The special characteristic of -ba/-reba is that it is used for hypotheticals. So it must always mean "if".

It can't ever mean "when", because we never know for sure if the condition will take place and consequently if we use it about something that happened in the past it has to be something that didn't happen because if it did happen we wouldn't be dealing with a hypothesis, we'd be dealing with a fact.

Now this hypothetical nature of -ba/-reba allows it to be used in many common and very important Japanese expressions.

For example, "dou su-reba ii".

What this literally means is "how, if I act, will be good".

And I'll just note here that while "suru" is generally translated as "do", in many cases the best way to render it into English is as "act".

So, for example, if we say "shizuka-ni suru", we're not saying "do quietly", we're saying "act quietly".

So, "do su-reba ii" -- "how, if I act, will be good".

And in English what we'd normally say is "What should I do?"

But in Japanese we don't say that.

As we'll see, this is partly because the concept of "should" isn't quite the same in Japanese, and -ba/-reba is often used to solve the problem.

We'll come back to that in a moment.

Another common use of -ba/-reba is in "su-reba yokatta".

For example, "kasa-wo motteku-reba yokatta".

In English we would say "I should have brought an umbrella".

What we're actually saying here is "If I had brought an umbrella, it would have been good".

"Mottekuru", as I've explained elsewhere, we join the word "carry" and the word "come" to mean "bring" ("carry-to-here") and we notice that "yokatta" throws it into the past tense.

As you know, in Japanese, we mark the past tense at the end of a logical clause.

So even though it may be true that if it's raining right now, if I had brought an umbrella it would have been good and it still would be good, we throw the whole thing into the past tense with that final "yokatta".

"Kasa-wo motteku-reba yokatta" --

"I should have brought an umbrella / I wish I had brought an umbrella."

Now notice that in both these cases, "do su-reba ii" / "kasa-wo motteku-reba yokatta", we are using this "if it were done, it would be good" to mean "should".

And this happens again in an even commoner Japanese construction.

"Benkyou shina-kereba ikemasen" -- "If I don't study, it won't go / it won't do."

Now what we are actually saying here is "I must study".

There actually isn't a word for "must" in Japanese, so we always construct it this way.

We say "If I don't... (whatever it is)" and then we can say "it won't be good / it will be bad / it'll be a disaster..."

Whatever we say, some negative construction then follows this, and what we're saying is "I must go / I've got to go / I've got to do this / I've got to do that", and this is because we don't have that construction "got to" and we don't have "must" in Japanese.

It always has this rather lengthy "If I don't do, it won't be good / if I don't do, it won't do / If I don't do, it's bad" -- "na-kereba dame".

And because it is indeed a very long-winded way of saying something common like "must" or "got to", it often gets cut down in casual speech to just "shina-kereba" or even "shina-kya", which is short for "shina-kereba",

without adding the negative ending, because that's just implied.

However, even in very casual speech it's often said in full, and I think this is to emphasize the nature of the "must".

"Naze ikana-kereba ikenai?" -- "Why have I got to come?"

In cases like that, where we're putting stress on it as opposed to cases where we're just saying casually "ikana-kya" -- "I've got to go".

So this is the special characteristic of -ba/-reba, that it's dealing with hypotheticals.