Why does 今度【こんど】 mean "next time"?


The word 今度【こんど】, though its literal meaning is "this time" is in my
experience used pretty heavily to refer to tbe _next_ time or some unspecified
point in the future. For example:

> 今度【こんど】こそ一緒【いっしょ】に行【い】こう！  
>  Let's go together next time!

This has confused me since I was just beginning to learn Japanese, and I
messed it up again not too long ago, after years of study. Maybe some reasons
will help keep this straight in my head.

Why is 今度【こんど】 so often used to mean "next time" or "sometime" rather than
"this time"?




The reason is because that is generally the _closest_ translation that you can
get in English most of the time.

Let's look at some examples:

> 今度の仕事の方が前の仕事より厳しい (My new job is harder than my old one)

In English, when we think of "next time", we think of something that hasn't
happened yet, something that is in the **future**. However, as shown in the
example above, "the new job" is something that already has started. So, when
we think about 今度, it is possible to think about something that has already
happened.

> 今度九州に転勤しました

Notice that the above is something that has already happened (past tense).

So from the above we can gather that 今度 can talk about something that happened
recently in future or the past. The idea is 今度 refers to something that
happens multiple times and you want to refer to the time that just happened
recently or will happen in the immediate future.

> 今度入社したA君です

Another use of 今度 is to mean the same thing as 今回 or このたび as a fixed
expression when doing 挨拶, etc.




It's easy if you think of 今度 as being like English days of the week. When we
say "This Thursday", we don't necessarily mean it is Thursday today (that
would be "this day") but we mean the Thursday of this week, or "this (coming)
Thursday".

"Next Thursday" would denote "the Thursday of next week".

Likewise, the translation of 今度 as "this time" can stand to mean "this
(coming) time".

Hope that's helpful!

