2

This is the sentence:

私は韓国人ではありません。

Watashi wa kangokujin de wa arimasen.

I'm not Korean.

I was expecting something like:

私は韓国人ありません。

Watashi wa kangokujin arimasen.

Why is the では necessary? And what does it mean?

wyc
  • 233
  • 1
  • 3
  • 8

2 Answers2

4

ではありません should be treated as a single word (for now, at least). It is the negative form of です, so it means 'is not', 'am not', 'are not' etc.

You may have already seen the contracted form of the plain speech version じゃない. In this form じゃ is a contraction of では, and ない is the plain speech form of the polite ありません.

On its own ありません is the negative form of あります which is the polite form of ある. This means 'to have', 'to exist' etc. So your sentence 私は韓国人ありません is ungrammatical and doesn't make much sense. 私は韓国人がありません would mean "I don't have a Korean person" which sounds pretty odd to me.

chocolate
  • 65,531
  • 5
  • 99
  • 204
user3856370
  • 30,011
  • 6
  • 51
  • 166
  • I've spent quite some time searching the web for a satisfactory explanation of では, and have not found one. This response doesn’t provide one either. It’s tempting to conclude that there is no satisfactory explanation. – justerman Jan 28 '20 at 08:58
  • @justerman It may be worth asking another question about this. It's too deep for me to give an answer though. – user3856370 Jan 29 '20 at 06:15
  • @justerman Have you seen https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/1077 ? – Karl Knechtel Sep 17 '23 at 03:36
  • @Karl Knechtel: I hadn't seen that. Thank you. It was useful. – justerman Sep 20 '23 at 07:36
-4

It seems to be a double negative for emphasis as in Spanish. Hard to get used to if your native language uses a single negative as in logic.

TimeVariant
  • 93