Mapping 16 English tenses to Japanese tenses


I am really confused in digesting Japanese tenses while referring to English
tenses in mind. Is there a list mapping each English tense to Japanese one?

Please kindly also provide us with some sentences per tense.




> "Is there a list mapping each English tense to Japanese one?"

There is a simple answer to this question: No. Unrelated languages, like
English (or any other Indo-European language) and Japanese do not have
corresponding sets of grammar functions, so it is not possible in any
meaningful way to map one to the other.

It may sound hard, but you have to learn how different bits of Japanese verb
morphology ("endings", in other words) work, and work on hearing enough
Japanese that you _understand_ it. Whether or not you can immediately give
"English replacements" for the bits is largely irrelevant, and if you struggle
through trying to pretend that each Japanese structure has a corresponding
English structure, you will have a very hard time as you keep bumping into the
fact that this is not true.

I hope this helps; that is my intention, but there are many people around with
other ideas -- for example that everything is about "translation", which I
think is a way to make things even more difficult than they already are.

