The Secrets of Japanese: -てみる (-te miru)

To understand this installment of The Secrets of Japanese, you need to have learned the "te form" of Japanese verbs. I assume that you know how to recognize it, how to form it, and its basic meaning.Sentences marked with an asterisk (*) are incorrect.

Trying Something, or Trying to Do Something?

The difficulty of learning just what [verb]-てみる means is that many Japanese teachers do not fully unsderstand the word try or the difference between the things traditionally labeled the gerund (-ing) and the infinitive (to [verb]). It's clear to native speakers that "Try to do your homework" is completely different from "Try doing your homework", but for many non-native speakers, the difference is not clear since all they see is "try + -ing as a noun" and "try + infinitive as a noun". Similarly, subtleties in other languages' methods of expressing "try" might not be transparent to native English speakers. Since most books define the expression -てみる as try but don't specifically contrast it with "try to [verb]" (or even explain how to say "try to [verb]"), it can be difficult for native English speakers to determine which senses of try the expression covers. Another factor that makes -てみる difficult to interpret is that some books fail to explain its full range of meaning because they treat it as a set phrase to the exclusion of explaining the meaning of its parts. Sometimes -てみる does not mean try, but if the idea that -てみる is mostly analytically transparent (it means what its parts mean ["do something and see"]), not just an idiom for try, is never validated, then students miss or dismiss the idea and learn to use and interpret the expression only for situations that strictly match the English usages of try, whether they're the right senses of the -てみる or not.

My Japanese teacher in high school translated [verb]-てみる as "try to [verb]" and as "try x". However, she also gave example sentences that didn't fit well with attempting to do something, such as the following variations on the theme of eating sushi.

Incorrect Translation	Correct Alternatives
寿司を食べてみて。 sushi wo tabete mite. *"Try to eat sushi"	"Eat sushi and see [what it is like]." "Try eating sushi." "Try sushi."
寿司を食べてみたいですか。 sushi wo tabete mitai desu ka. *"Would you like/Do you want to try to eat sushi."	"Would you like to eat sushi and see [what it is like]?" "Would you like to try eating sushi?" "Would you like to try sushi?"

Unless the person in question has some sort of physical or mental problem with eating in general or with eating fish specifically, it does not make sense to say "Would you like to attempt to eat sushi". The context of the conversations in class, the textbook's stories, and our exercises never even hinted at such details. Instead of attributing the strangeness of the interpretation to the idiosyncrasies of a foreign language, it makes much more sense to assume that the interpretation is wrong and that the straightforward translation "do [verb] and see [what it's like]/[what happens]" is correct. In specific cases, such as those of food, or where the point is to experience the thing in question, the meaning of "do[verb] and see" is consistent with "Try [noun]" (as in "You should try ginger" or "You should try hot springs"). When one considers the expression -てみる in this light, it becomes clear that it can never mean "try to [verb]": "do [verb] and see" requires that you finish the action in question, while "try to [verb]" allows for the possibility that you might fail to complete it or even to start.

In the interest of allowing for credit to be given where it might be due, I have to say that I can't recall what my textbook said -てみる means (we were using the Ima! series, level 3, which I think was called Hai, Ima), but I distinctly remember that my whole class was confused. Fortunately for students, there are popularly sold reference books that do not confuse the pattern with "try to [verb]". Unfortunately, those books tend to give a correct definition that is not complete.

Rita L. Lampkin's Japanese Verbs & Essentials of Grammar (pg. 37) gives the "do and see" meaning and the "try doing" one, but not "try [noun]".

From Japanese Verbs

おいしいですから、食べてみて下さい。 Oishii desu kara, tabete mite kudasai. "It's delicious, so eat it and see." "It's delicious; try it." (my rendition to illustrate "try [noun]")

怪しい音が聞こえたから、部屋に入ってみました。 Ayashii oto ga kikoetakara, heyani haitte mimashita. "I heard a suspicious noise, so I went into the room to see (check it out)" "I heard a suspicious noise, so I tried going into the room [to see what was up]"(my rendition

Another reference, an nifty book I picked up during my study abroad in Japan titled 「どんなときどう使う日本語表現文型辞曲」(When and How to Use It: A Dictionary of Japanese Expressions and Sentence Patterns),gives "try doing" as the shortcut translation of -てみる and gives the following English description of its meaning: Try something in order to find out more about it　(pg. 199). When and How to Use It is written in Japanese with explanations of the expressions in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English. It does not provide translations of its examples. The Japanese explanation of the expression translates to "Indicates doing something as a test in order to learn something/find something out."

Adapted From When and How to Use It (translations are my own)

この新しいボールペンを使ってみました。とても書きやすいです。 Kono atarashii BOURU PEN wo tsukatte mimashita. Totemo kaki-yasui desu. "I tried this new ball-point pen. It's very easy to write with."

日光ですか。ぜひ一度行ってみたいと思っていたんです。 Nikkou desu ka. Zehi ichido itte mitai to omotteita n desu. "Nikkou?(a place) I was thinking I'd certainly like to see it [at least] once." ("...like to go there and see what it's like [to go there]")

ちょっとこのスカートをはいてみてもいいですか。 chotto kono SUKAATO wo haite mite mo ii desu ka. "May I try this skirt on for a bit?"

コンサートの切符がまだあるか聞いてみましたが、もうないそうです。 KONSAATO no kippu ga mada aru ka kiite mimashita ga mou nai sou desu. "I tried asking whether there were still tickets, but it seems there aren't any any more."

Although When and How to Use It gives a variety of clear examples, not all of them can be translated according to the "try doing", or "try [verb]ing", pattern. What's going on in the English? Well, we can see from my earlier discussion that "try [noun]" is appropriate whenever the main concern is to experience the noun (to learn what that noun is like). Sometimes, though, the main point of trying something is to test out a certain action or approach as a way to accomplish a particular goal. It seems that that is the major nuance of "try [verb]ing". For instance, if you want to get the taste of some other food out of your mouth so you can appreciate your sushi, someone might tell you to try eating ginger—and though one could respond to the question "what should I use to cleanse my palate?" with "try ginger", one could not tell someone to taste ginger by saying "try eating ginger". Thus, despite the slight overlap in meaning, we can see that the general implications of "try eating ginger" and "try ginger" are different, but they are both consistent with "eat ginger and see"; it just depends on what you see.

Finally, just to play a bit of Devil's advocate, we should ask ourselves how we really know that -てみる means "try [noun]", "try [verb]ing", and "do [verb] and see". After all, if I'm going to question my teacher's interpretation, I should question my own. Furthermore, just because the Japanese expression sometimes matches up with certain uses of the English word try doesn't mean that it actually covers all the same nuances that the English word does. Grammatically, -てみる literally says "[verb] and (then) see", and although the expression lends itself to metaphorical seeing rather than literal seeing, the second examples from Japanese Verbs and When and How to Use It demonstrate that -てみる still retains the much of the meaning of its parts. The food examples I discussed at the beginning of the article and the first example from Japanese Verbs prove that it covers "try [noun]".

Dennou Coil's main character on her virtual phone.

Click here to see a clip of the episode.

The idea that "try [verb]ing" is also covered is supported by Japanese Verbs example number 2 and When and How to Use It example 4. For a definitive example of -てみる in the sense of trying an action as a means to accomplish a goal, I think it'd be fun to consider the "real life" speech of an anime, specifically a scene from the delightfully provocative children's sci-fi show Dennou Coil.The premise of the show is that in the future there are glasses that connect your brain to a physical, three-dimensional virtual reality, which you view and interact with via the special glasses. With the glasses you can type on a keyboard of air, view web pages or email projected on the air in front of you, make phone calls, and even touch virtual pets. Those who do not use the glasses neither see nor are affected by the virtual reality.

In episode 19, the main character's little sister is attacked by a virus that separates her consciousness from her physical body and forces her to wander the virtual world. Left untreated, the girl will fall into a coma. The main character's unusually tech-savvy grandmother has whipped up a hack that will fix the girl's condition, but only if her physical body is within 3 meters of her mind. When the characters are discussing how they can get the girl's mind and body back in the same place, the grandmother says 「可能性は低いが、電話かけてみ」("kanousei wa hikui ga, denwa kakete mi")("The probability [of success] is low, but try calling her"). "Kakete mi", an informal way of giving a command, is equivalent to "kakete mite". The grandmother could not have been saying to try the phone to see what it's like (the characters have all used a telephone before): she can only be saying to test out the possibility of using the phone to reach the girl's mind and tell her where to go to reunite with her body.

Why Japanese is Hard to Learn, or The Secrets of Japanese

This infographic comes from Voxy Blog.

Click to enlarge.

Although most people say that it is extremely difficult for English speakers to learn Japanese (understand and/or translate it effectively) because of its grammatical differences, I have come to the conclusion that it is because the proper grammatical perspective/foundation needed to understand Japanese is simply hidden from students. It is not because of the inherent difficulty of the language. Whether that secret information has been hidden on purpose or by accident I can't quite tell: Linguistics supplies the tools to understand language from syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic perspectives, so the knowledge needed to form a better curriculum for teaching Japanese is out there somewhere, though possibly in bits and pieces that have yet to be fashioned into a cohesive approach. Unfortunately, decades of well-intentioned ineffectiveness stand between each student of Japanese and the knowledge that would demystify the language. To paint a clearer picture of the situation, I'll back up and present a few objective obstacles to learning Japanese.


It is not just prestige-seeking braggarts and students making excuses for poor grades that say Japanese is difficult: Even the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) and the National Security Agency (NSA) recognize its difficulty. This declassified paper from the NSA concludes that for English speakers Japanese is relatively harder than Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Arabic, and Vietnamese among others. The FSI has developed a rough categorization of languages (see infographic on the right) according to the approximate study time needed in order for its students to reach its goals. The people at the FSI expect to have to train their students with 2200 hours of class split up into 88 weeks. That's daunting in comparison to Spanish, which is only 600 hours max spread over a maximum of 24 weeks. Let's not forget that those figures do not include the students' study time—it's only the class time! Moreover, the FSI's program is designed with people who are already highly motivated and able to learn language relatively well in a class setting. Since the NSA paper does a thorough job detailing what kinds of factors make learning a foreign language difficult (with especially detailed explanations about Japanese), I'm not going to reinvent the wheel and explain all the features of Japanese that back up these huge numbers; inquiring minds should just check the paper. Instead, I'm going to get straight to my perspective about the problems with Japanese education, why I consider the information hidden, and why I think we can do better than what we have.

When two communities that each speak a different language come into contact, a lot of things can happen—even if you rule out the possibility that one will conquer the other. Sometimes a primitive, mostly grammarless language with words borrowed from the two full-fledged languages develops (In linguistics it's called a pidgin). The Pidgin language can help people get by with daily tasks, such as simple sales and transactions. If children are raised in the pidgin language environment, they might assign more grammar onto the pidgin, expand its vocabulary, and cause it to become a new, separate language (called a Creole). Or perhaps the children grow up to be bilingual. In any case, it's gonna be a while before complicated communication in one language can be understood/interpreted/translated for the other. In the meantime people have to try to decode words and grammar by the situation, make hypotheses about the meanings of the words and the structure of the grammar, and see whether the hypotheses continue to make sense for new situations. Consider how many nuances there are in the word order of English and in vocabulary words such as accountability and responsibility, killing and murder, honest, frank, and blunt. Clearly it's a monumental task. If the two languages are similar (English and Spanish for instance), it's a much easier story—but if the two languages are entirely different in word order and vocabulary (English and Japanese), then it's more complicated. That doesn't even take into account cultural differences in communication. Once some of the members of each community believe they have decoded enough of the other language, they probably start teaching it. Since neither side has a complete picture, there are going to be things that are unclear or even entirely wrong.

One way to teach language in this kind of environment is to teach set translations of difficult expressions and to show students how to use certain grammatical structures in certain situations. Usually this means learning sentence "patterns" that have blanks left in them so that the learner can substitute different nouns or verbs. Then it doesn't matter if no one knows how to use the grammar in any situation: everyone can squeak by for topics they're taught. In this kind of instruction, there's very little emphasis on understanding grammar, whether in the native language or in the other language. Japanese is usually taught this way. For example, many Japanese textbooks do not mention parts of speech and do not label new vocabulary words with possible parts of speech. That can be very confusing if one does not know much about the grammar of the language. If you don't tell English learners that jump can be a verb and a noun, or that some words (such as exploit) have different pronunciations depending on the part of speech, they might not learn how to use or understand those words, even if they have a general idea of what they mean.

Now, this is not to say that that approach to teaching language is all wrong: It can help student's develop fluency by making them familiar with certain ways of saying things and making them repeat similar sentences. Instead of thinking through the grammar to build a sentence for the situation, students can default to certain patterns they know and switch out a few words to adjust to the specific topic and get their point across. However, because they do not know much about the grammar, students will be more likely to make mistakes or be unable to understand "new" uses of the words or structures they learned. They will also have more trouble adjusting to new topics or trying to find ways to express nuances in their native language. A simplistic example of this problem in Japanese education for English speakers is how to say "thank you".

No matter how much you would enjoy this card,

"thank you" cannot change tense.

In Japanese there are many variations, but the main word for it is arigatou. Although in English one can only say "thank you" without verb tense/in the present tense, in Japanese you can say it in the present (arigatou gozaimasu) or the past (arigatou gozaimashita). Without knowing about the grammar involved, English speakers get confused about the difference and do not learn to use it correctly. There are several relatively simple yet surprising grammatical points involved. The first is that arigatou is an adverb formed from the adjective arigatai, which means thankful. The second is that gozaimasu is the super-polite way to say the verb arimasu, which is one of the words for be. The last one is that in Japanese, the basic pattern of describing things is [adverb] + [existence/being verb], not [form of be]+[adjective]. In the end, the two expressions for "thank you" mean "I am thankful" and "I was thankful". Unfortunately, none of those three basic grammatical rules/observations are taught in Japanese class, and the difference between the two expressions is not explained well. This is what I mean by saying that the key to learning Japanese is hidden from students and that the information is secret. It would be extremely easy to explain grammatical points like these in class, and it would probably save many students a few headaches, but for whatever reason, the information just isn't widely available.

Although I can't say for sure, I suspect that Japanese classes typically do not include this information because the material for teaching Japanese-speakers English and the material for teaching English-speakers Japanese are probably old and probably contain the kinds of mistakes that naturally result during the long process of decoding other languages that happens when languages come into contact. Previous generations' hard work at deciphering words, creating dictionaries, and understanding unfamiliar expressions and grammatical structures was not perfect (nor should it have been), and the mistaken/incomplete explanations and solutions have piled up and been transferred through classes to future generations. After all, most Japanese teachers are native speakers of Japanese with an imperfect understanding of English acquired from English-speakers with little to no understanding of Japanese. Similarly, many English teachers in Japan are native speakers of English with an imperfect understanding of Japanese. There are also many English teachers who are native Japanese-speakers with an imperfect knowledge of English acquired from other Japanese-speakers with an imperfect knowledge of English. However, English and Japanese have been in contact for at least 160 years. We should be able to make better grammatical and semantic descriptions now, and we should be able to use the new analysis to revise and demystify the troublesome areas of these languages. Just as this post explained why "thank you" has tense in Japanese, future posts in the series "The Secrets of Japanese" will each tackle a specific difficulty I've run into and discuss the grammatical secret(s) that make each problem easier to understand.