nihongo wo benkyou shitai

Last time I had a look at 'why' and discovered that politeness plays a big part in which word you use. This time I'll look at another handy word 'but'.

Now, 'but' can be used in a number of ways, but here I'll concentrate on it's use (in English) as a 'co-ordinating conjunction'. If you've no idea what that is, then I'm happy - nor did I so now I don't feel so stupid... Anyways, I looked it up and apparently a co-ordinating conjunction is a word that links two sentences and gives at least one of the following properties:

• The statement in sentence B is opposite in meaning to sentence A.
• When sentence B shows a failure to achieve to goal indicated in sentence A.
  

Well, that's the English cleared up, eh?

A quick trawl through my notes and there appears to be a bunch of Japanese words for 'but': でも, しかし, けれども, けれど, けども, けど and が are the ones I found. There has to be some magic rule as to which one to use and when. And there is.

でも and しかし are used to start sentences. The Japanese grammatical term for these babies is also conjunction. Try this example:

English: My Japanese is very poor. But I would like to try and speak.
Jenglish: [My Japanese][very poor][is]. [But][speak + try]
日本語： 僕の日本語がとても下手です。しかし、話すみます。

What's the difference between でも and しかし? しかし is the けいご (polite) version of でも. Now, an interesting point to note here is that the tense used in each sentence can be different. So you could have:

English: Yesterday, I didn't want to read that book. But today I will read it.
Jenglish: [Yesterday][that book][read + want + past]. [But][today][read].
日本語： 昨日その本を読みたくなかった。でも、今日は読む。

Next up is it's use within a larger sentence. Here we have [clause A], but [clause B]. Again, it is all a matter of politeness. To be very polite, use が or けれども. Then becoming increasingly more casual, use けれど, けども and finally けど. One thing to note is that both clauses of the must be the same politeness level and tense. You could not translate the above English as follows:

日本語： 昨日その本を読みたくなかったけど、今日は読む。(this is wrong!)

Note that unlike でも and しかし, these are not conjunctions! They are called 'clause particles'. They wield mighty power, so use them wisely. Another Japanese mystery solved! It's at times like this that I think I might one day be able to speak the language! As if!

またね。