"There are three things I don't want you to forget."

[thegooseking]

みんなさん、こんにちは、

I'm having trouble finding a sensible way to write the statement, "There are three things I don't want you to forget" in Japanese.

"There are three things" is simple enough:-
三つのことがあります。
mittsu no koto ga arimasu.

"I don't want you to forget" is a descriptive relative clause, so what we'll end up with is:-
？？三つのことがあります。
?? mitsu no koto ga arimasu.

Now in English, there are two verbs here "don't want" and "to forget". We can see it's the 'want' that is negated in English. Is it the same in Japanese? I.e., which is right:-
忘れてほしくない
wasurete hoshikunai (don't want (you) to forget)
or
忘れなくてほしい
wasurenakute hoshii (want (you) to not forget)

And, whichever one of those is right, is the fact that the two verbs have different subjects implied by ほしい (The single-subject "I don't want to forget" would be 忘れたくない / wasuretakunai, right?), or do I need to be more clear about that?

よろしくおねがいします、
小狼

[mmmason8967]

Hmmm. Tricky. Maybe one area of difficulty is the General Rule of Thumb that says that if you want to say something in Japanese, then having a clear idea of how to say it English means you're doomed to struggle. So it might be worth taking a step backwards and re-stating the overall idea in vaguer terms...

There are three items (or things, or points).

They must be remembered. Or, to put it another way, they must not be forgotten.

If you want to tell someone that you want them to do something, the Japanese sentence is fairly likely to end in ~te kudasai. So maybe you should aim towards a structure that ends with something like ...忘れなくてください.

You'll have gathered that I don't know the answer and I'm just thinking out loud...

マイケル

[community.japanese]

小狼さん、
Good question!

マイケルさん、
Thank you for the help.


In order to express “There are three things I don't want you to forget” we can use some sentence structures.
1. 忘れてほしくない三つのことがあります。
2. 忘れないでほしいことが三つありますis actually “there are three things I want you not to forget”.
3. 三つのことを忘れないでください is actually “Please don’t forget three things”.


Yuki 由紀
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