nihongo wo benkyou shitai

日本語：	[verb (base 3)/noun] ことができる。
English:	Can do...

OK. A quick grammar point from JLPT3 tonight, but nonetheless, it's an essential one to know. I covered potential verbs back in April, and thought that we had pretty much wrapped the subject up, but it seems that we have another way in which we can express the ability, or inability, to do something.

Back in April, we ended up conjugating the verb and found that despite being an easy conjugation to remember, the resulting verb could become a bit of a mouthful to pronounce. You may be happy to know that tonight's alternative is simple to remember and simple to pronounce. All you do is leave the verb in base 3 and add ことができる.

Now, it is interesting to note that できる is the potential form of する and this can lead to a odd looking situation when using ことができる on する verbs. For example 'I can drive' translates into 私は運転することができます。 Perfectly correct, but pretty long winded. Well, given that できる is just another form of する, we can shorten this to 私は運転ができます. The する has been dropped along with the こと.

Simply put, する verbs are just nouns with the する slapped on the end to make them verbs. 運転する (to drive), 電話する (to phone) etc. The こと is used to turn a verb into a noun. Ergo, if we drop the する, the verb reverts back to being a noun and so こと is not needed. You could even shorten this to 私は運転できます, dropping the particle altogether, but that way too informal. OK, I'm off on a tangent here, but to finalise, the sentence 私は運転することができます could culled down to 運転できる at the extreme end. That's a serious amount of information compression.

The final question that came to mind was given that we now have two ways to express potentials - verb conjugation and ことができる, when do we use each? Here, it again simply comes down to politeness. ことができる is seen as more formal than the verb conjugation method.

例文

English:	I can eat spicy curries.
Jenglish:	[I][spicy][curries][eat][can]
日本語：	私は辛いカレーを食べることができます。

またね。。。