～てならないVery, Extremely, Can't help but do

Most Recent Replies (10 in total)

• 

  Pushindawood

  very
  extremely
  can’t help but do

  Structure

  • Verb[ て ] + ならない
  • いAdj[ くて ] + ならない
  • なAdj + で + ならない

  [Mostly used with adjectives that describe feelings]

  View on Bunpro

• 

  s1212z

  How interchange is て仕方がない with the examples sentences, at least for the “can’t help but”?

  This is hard to feel the translations because these seem like 3 different degrees intensity in one grammar point. I’m reading a “beyond control” type of meaning but ‘very’ and ‘extremely’ doesn’t seem match it. Are there varieties in meaning or is it just translation choices?

• 

  mrnoone

  てしようがない、てしょうがない てならない てたまらない are all very similar, to the point of almost completely overlapping in the way they are used.

  All of those express extreme physiological and psychical feelings that are of extreme degree, cannot be controlled, etc.
  It is important to mention that those are “private” expressions, so they are used to express feelings of speaker/writer. If you want to talk about other people extreme feelings you have to use らしい、ようだ, etc.

  First of all,
  てならない is a domain of people around 40, or even 50+ years old. It is much less often used by a younger generation. You can see it more often in literature, etc.

  The most common expressions nowadays are てたまらない、てしようがない、てしょうがない、て仕方がない、てしかない。

  てしょうがない is a casual expression and is mostly used in casual conversations.
  Other than that, it is completely identical in meaning with てしようがない and てしかたがない.

  Now, lets come to differences. However, even though I say differences, th...

• 

  s1212z

  Another very thorough response, thank you! Nice list, I think I’ve seen most but was unfamiliar with all these nuances.

  This helps ‘lock in’ the grammar point, particular given it’s a 1st person expression only

• 

  s1212z

  Unrelated to our previous discussion, ずにはいられない has mention of てならない as a hint/warning but there is nothing for ずにはいられない. I would post this in the bug section but I’m entirely confident (there may be a nuance I’m missing). Is this interchangeable?
• 

  ljoekelsoey

  @s1212z , did you ever find if this was completely interchangeable or not?

• 

  s1212z

  It would need to be 気にせずにはいられない but the が is locked here as part of the example, otherwise I believe it would be interchangeable.

• 

  mrnoone

  @ljoekelsoey @s1212z

  To be honest, I would stick to てならない in this example.

  ずにはいられない is generally used in contexts when one wants to do something so bad that they cannot control themselves. Expresses strong impulse.
  I would say that average Japanese would not really understand what one means by:
  詐欺にあった気にせずにはいられない。

  てならない is more generic.
  詐欺にあった気がしてならない。

  I hope it helps,
  Cheers!

• 

  simias

  I’m really confused by this point because I don’t really understand the underlying concept of the Japanese construction.

  To take one of the examples discussed previously here:

  詐欺にあった気がしてならない。

  I think that a very literal word-for-word translation would be something like “it can’t become that I feel that it was a fraud” or something like that, but this seems to imply the opposite of what it actually means.

  I actually first encountered this point outside of Bunpro in a videogame I was playing, and I had to look it up here because I couldn’t make sense of it even in context since it seemed to say the opposite of what it’s actually saying.

  I don’t get where this negative is coming from and how this expression came to mean that.

• 

  nekoyama

  I don’t think this works as a literal translation, the two parts aren’t linked in this fashion.

• 

  simias

  Yeah I noticed that dictionaries would have a separate item specifically for this use, but it’s quite funny as a result because it seems like the word says one thing and its opposite: