Hello, everyone. It’s one point lesson time! Today, I’m going to show you a quite interesting phenomenon of Japanese. It’s the words without “ら”.
If you have learned a little Japanese, you should have been taught the word transformation of expressing “be able to do something”. It’s basically turning …ます into …られる. For example,
食べます→食べられる
- 私は納豆が食べられません。(I can’t eat nattou./I don’t eat nattou.)
However, the authentic Japanese is 私は納豆が食べれません. You can see that the “ら” has been deleted. But why?
The reason is that it’s liable to misunderstand the word with the passive format, which means (we still use the above example) 食べられる can be also understood as “be eaten”. Therefore, the “ら” is deleted in order to eliminate the misunderstanding. It doesn’t mean that the textbook is wrong, though, this is the way that Japanese people talk.
Other examples are like the following:
- be able to see→見れる, not 見られる
- be able to come→来れる, not 来られる
- etc.
See you next time!