nipponDAZE

“We want our money back.” In English the sentence is so simple but what a lot of trouble I had translating it into Japanese, even though I knew every vocabulary word.

There is a subtle difference between “We want our money.” and “We want our money back.” The former implies we want something that is due to us (such as wages or a payment). The latter that we want something that was borrowed returned to us. It’s really shorthand for “We want our money given back.” “We want our money returned.”

However, in Japanese there is no verb for “to want”. Desire is expressed in two ways. If you want to do something, conjugate the verb as follows. V + tai n desu ga. If you want to have something, state the object of desire and use the adjective “is desirable”.

I want a new car. = As for me, new car is desirable.

But how do you say that you want someone else to do something without turning it into a command. “We want our money [given] back.” has a different sense than a request “Please return our money.” or an order, “Give us the money!” By dropping the verb “given”, the sentence expresses a change of state without focusing on the cause of that change. “We want the money back.” implies an actor and an action offstage. We want to have the money. Someone will have to give it to us but the who and how are not explicitly stated in this sentence; they are understood from context.

I took a wrong turn in the grammar and tried to nominalize “the money returned by the bankers” and came up with 「銀行家にお金を返すのが欲しいです。」Kiyo provided the correction: 「銀行家にお金を返して欲しいです。」My problem was that I didn’t read far enough in “A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar”. The next entry explains that if you want someone to do something you use the construction:

I think the Japanese sentence lacks the simple directness of the English sentence–at least when it is translated back literally into English. Maybe in Japanese to a Japanese person it sounds direct. In English it is quite common for a dissatisfied customer in a store, restaurant or movie theater to say, “I want my money back!” No wonder Americans sound demanding. It’s built into our language.