A much less adventurous day today. Adventurous days produce interesting stories, but I think for parental sanity they need to be interspersed with less adventurous days!
It's been hot today. 34.5 degrees Celcius in our bedroom at 4pm, and now at 9pm it isn't much below that. I'm not sure I'll find it easy to go to sleep tonight. Not feeling too optimistic about the future either. Summer is a love-hate season for me. I love the freedom of few clothes, but I really would prefer to be only moderately hot, not stinking hot. I grew up in Toowoomba, which has/d a moderate climate, especially the summer nights used to be lovely, not sweaty and yucky. Also the humidity there was no where near what we experience here in Tokyo.
But the most unusual thing that happened to me today was at the end of sweating it out at the gym. A Japanese lady approached me, speaking in hesitant English. It turns out she is a teacher at a Cram school and had an English grammar question and she put this one to me:
Which of these two sentences is correct?
If I'd known the fact, I'd never gone there.
or
If I'd known the fact, I'd never been there.
Well of course neither is correct until you add a "have" after "never". But as for which is the most correct, I faltered. I was frustrated. Here I call myself and editor and I couldn't answer this question. There simply wasn't enough context. It apparently was a translation of a Japanese passage that the students had to do, but I didn't understand the sentence in Japanese!
It all really depends on whether they've completed their journey yet or not. And where this "conversation" occurs. Context is everything, I really couldn't correct the sentence with any confidence. Not to mention that all the oxygen was headed to my muscles and not my brain at that particular moment. I ended up telling her that I thought the first sentence was the best one, given a lack of context. I think her main feeling was, "If a native speaker can't figure this out then it really isn't easy!"
The one thing I did learn, though, was that you shouldn't "snatch" a pencil from a stranger in Japan to write something down. I automatically went to take the pencil she was holding to add the "haves" in and she was a bit shocked.
How about you? How would you have gone?
2 comments:
Yes, I'd prefer the first sentence, given the extra "have." The second is possible, but we'd be more likely to say "If I'd known (such-and-such) I wouldn't have been there in the first place" rather than use a "never" for that situation.
If the "have" is included, the two sentences have a slightly different emphasis. The first highlights the act of going and the second highlights the act of being there.
The second, I suspect, would be more likely to be used when something adverse has happened as a result. At least that's how I would balance it.
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