Japanese grammar: past tense adjectives?
I've got a question about い-adjectives (i-adjectives) in Japanese. In my class, I've learned that the proper way to do polite, affirmative, past-tense adjectives is like this:
寒かったです
(samukatta desu)
(was cold)
But, is it also acceptable to write them like this:
寒いでした
(samui deshita)
(was cold)
Or would that be improper grammar? If both are acceptable, is one more acceptable than the other? And why?
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no, samui deshita is wrong. im not good at explaining why, but trust me, WRONG. in i-adjectives, you conjugate by taking off the i and adding kunakatta or katta, with desu after if you must be polite. you can't ignore the i and conjugate it with just desu...then if you were speaking w/o being polite, what would you do? get rid of the deshita? but then all you have is samui, which is obviously not past tense.
and in na adjectives, desu is for politeness, and if you want to be informal, you conjugate it to datta or ja nakatta
im not good at explaining as i said, but please just believe me, that samukatta or samukatta desu is correct and samui deshita is very wrong.
I can't say for certain that in this specific case you are correct as I'm not a native speaker but I use the phrase "Nihongo ga jyozu wasurichattan desu." which is the same form except -chattan is regretfully past tense. Hope that helps! Oh, and it means I've unfortunately skillfully forgotten Japanese.
As the poster above me said, "samui deshita" is wrong. To make i-adjectives past tense it must be "katta desu" or "katta" casually.
Deshita is ok to use with na-adjectives, but not i-adjectives.
they Are both acceptable but in reality samui deshita is like you said improper grammar. the first one 'samukatta desu' is the right one.