"今年カナダに行くつもりです。"
Translation:I plan to go to Canada this year.
27 Comments
Ikr, I kept looking for "I intend to go to Canada" or "I plan to go to Canada", and it threw me off quite a bit to not find either of them there.
Neither does saying "I'm going" guarantee your future trip, though. It's an intention in both cases, sadly enough... It's just that the implied "unless ..it happens" is actually pronounced in Japanese :)
The implication of つもりだ is less certain than that, though. (Partly for cultural reasons-- getting a Japanese person to say something straight can be like pulling teeth, because culturally it's just not really done most of the time. Amd that's reflected in the grammar). But still, "I'm going to" implies a great degree of certainty and confidence. 行くつもり is more like, "(God willing/assumimg nothing comes up,) I plan/intend/hope to go." If it wdfe actually "I'm going" then they'd say 行きます unless they were being deferential at work or something.
~tsumori also doesn't necessarily imply that any preparations have already been completed. The flights may or may not be booked. The hotels may or may not be reserved. The time off request might have been submitted or processed, and they've probably LOOKED at flights and hotels, but that's all we can say for sure as a listener. But when we say "I'm going to," it implies that it's very much set in stone (unforseen disasters aside), and we wouldn't even use that conjugation unless hotels or flights were booked (one or the other at least). That's why we ofteb hear, "~するつもりだったが..." (I had intended to~ but...(something came up)."
[Disclaimer: I don't remember what text books have to say on this anymore, but this is how the real Japanese native speakers around me seem to be using this construction in real life].
(Some text books just explain the usage, others try and imply all sorts of cultural stuff. I'm just a translator, not a historical linguist, so I look for the shortcuts that always apply and simplify the way of thinking about things — and this one's pretty much "I intend to", and seriously speaking, you can lossy-imply it or spell it out in either English or Japanese, like you could say "I would have gone to Canada this year, but something came up"; this is not a difference of languages per se.)
This says that you intend to go to Canada, but it does not specify how you feel about going there.
カナダに行くつもりだis intending to go, カナダに行こうと思ってる is thinking about going, and カナダに行く予定（よてい）だ means you have the ticket and you know what date and time you're arriving
Maybe when using it as a noun on its own one would, but when it's used as a grammatical marker, the default is kana.
The same goes for helper verbs following the -te form of a verb: ~ている、 <sub>てみる、</sub>てくる、 ~ていく vs 居る、見る、来る、行く.
766
Why is "This year I will go to canada" excluded from the pool of correct answers. Wouldn't this be a right answer as well?
- 760
I think the reason it wasn't included is tied to how the future tense is taught in Japan. At the junior high school level "be going to" is taught as つもり (tsumori) or 予定 (yotei). "Will" is taught as でしょう (deshou) and is mainly used for predicting the weather. I know the curriculum has been changing, but there's this kind of rigidity where "will" and "be going to" have to be separated and couldn't possibly be used to translate the same sentence.
- 760
"I plan to go to Canada this year" is accepted now. I think your translation has similar intent, though the grammar may not quite line up.
I put 'I plan to' for one sentence but it was marked wrong with the translation given as 'I'm planning to'. the next time a similar sentence came up, I put 'I'm planning to' and it was marked wrong with the translation given as 'I plan to'. One was for 'next year' and one was for 'this year' but this should not make a difference in the translation of "tsumori".
