When I was learning その, I came across a lot of sentences that included てもいい at the
end of the sentence. I was pretty confused what that meant even when I saw the translation. I spent
a good amount of time today trying to wrap my head around how this is used and how to translate
sentences that have てもいい in them. I’ll try my best to explain what I learned below!
As always, keep in mind that I’m learning Japanese so this info may be wrong :)
Verbs
It’s pretty important to know the
てform prior to learning this. I sort of understand this but I’ll definitely have to spend more time on it in the future (and probably make a post about it)
Let’s start with the verb “eat”. What if I wanted to ask, “Can I eat?”. We should start by making
the て form of the verb “to eat”. So 食べる would become 食べて. By itself, that would mean
“please eat”.
Once we add on the も character (食べても), though - it starts to become something like,
“Even if I eat”. Then, if we add on いい (good / fine) - the sentence becomes 食べてもいい.
Now this sentence could be translated in one of two ways: a question or a statement.
If we assume it’s a question, (aka assume that the intonation is phrased in such a way or
there’s context around it) then it would mean something like, “Even if I eat, is it fine?” - which
sounds better in English as, “Can I eat?” If we wanted to make it a bit more polite or make it clear
that it’s a question, we could add ですか to the end and say 食べてもいいですか.
What does 食べてもいい mean if it’s not a question, though? It’s actually the inverse of the
question! So instead of, “Can I eat?” it becomes, “Even if you eat, it’s fine” or, more naturally,
“You can eat.” (I think it would be more common for it to end in よ if it was a statement).
You can simplify this to just いいよ (casual) or いいですよ (polite) - although I’ll leave よ
for another post as I don’t fully grasp it yet and I also don’t want this post to be too long.
Nouns and Adjectives
A noun is a person place or thing and an adjective is something that describes a noun.
In the above section, we talked about the verb 食べる and how てもいい was used with it.
てもいい can be used with more than just verbs, though - it can also be used with nouns or
adjectives and I think it’s worth talking a bit about those as they are conjugated in a different way.
With verbs, we take the て form of the verb and then add もいい on to the end of that.
With nouns or adjectives, though, we have three options:
- If it’s an
いadjective, it becomesく + てもいい. So高い(expensive) would become高くてもいい. - If it’s a noun, it becomes
でもいい. So京都(Kyoto) would become京都でもいい. - If it’s a
なadjective, it follows the same rules as the noun. So有名(famous) would become有名でもいい.
The translation is pretty similar to the above - although I found it to be a little bit more confusing at times. Instead of thinking like “Even if X, it’s fine” - it’s more natural to think of these as “it is fine even if it is X”.
Let’s talk through an example of each:
I’m only like 70% confident the below sentences are right - please let me know if you know! ^^;;
高くてもいいwould be “It’s fine even if it’s expensive.”京都でもいいですかwould be, “Is it fine (even) if it is (in) Kyoto?”有名でもいいwould be, “It is fine (even) if it is famous.”
Final Thoughts
Like everything I’ve done in Japanese so far - there’s so much depth here! When I set out to write
this post, I didn’t even grasp the idea that verbs might be different than nouns or adjectives. I
had assumed that any variations (such as く being in words) were just one of those, “special
cases,” that seem to be so common.
I hope I got the general ideas right for this post! I definitely still have so much more to learn
about this - such as brushing up on the て form and understanding よ along with figuring out
what い adjectives vs. な adjectives are haha.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed this and, as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this! Have you learned about this before? Did it make sense to you? What made this concept make sense to you?