short question on lower intermediate 01

[kageri]

hi,

the question is about the sentence:

早く掃除しないと

it's translated with: I have to hurry and clean.

could anyone break the sentence for me? whats up with the negative form and the to?
How does it come to the translation "I have to..."
Did I miss something in the past lessons or is it just a to-konditional that misses the second part of the sentence?

thanks in advice

[Psy]

ないと is short for ないといけません, which is kind of a variation on なければなりません。It's part of the ongoing Japanese tradition of omitting details when they can be inferred. Confused me until someone explained it, too!

[Javizy]

～ないと in this case is a contraction of ～ないといけない 'must/have to do'. Another contraction meaning the same thing is ～なきゃ which comes from ～なければならない (なければ is often shortened to なきゃ in spoken language).

There are a bunch of other trail-off style contractions like this, which seem like a bit of a guessing game when you're learning to understand them, but they become really obvious after a bit more exposure, so don't worry. I think most of them are covered in the lessons as you progress.

[kageri]

thanks to both of you. now I can finally close this lesson. Since I did the beginner lessons a little sloppy I wanted to be more exact on the lower intermediates

[jaypunkrawk]

それを早く学ばないと。