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now, I'm writing a sakubun for my japanese class, and am wondering. Can you use double negatives in Japanese? I used the word for invisiable and in my dictionary it said me ni mienai, so in order to say, not truely invisible, would you use a double negative.


me ni mienakunai(?)

Sorry, I normally try not to ask questions here cause you should look this stuff up, but I have no one to ask other then you guys right now.

bai bai and Thank you.

No, that isn't a grammatical construction in Japanese. What is the whole sentence? It's hard to help without knowing.

I doubt "mienakunai" is okay. On the other hand though, "me ni mieru" would not really be saying what you want to say. I'm pretty sure there is some type of grammatical construction that will get your point across of it being "not truly invisible." I'm not entirely sure, but I imagine that "hontou ni wa me ni mienai koto ja nai" would be better at least, whether or not it's the most natural way of expressing that idea. Another one might be "Hontou ni me ni mienai to iu wake ni wa ikanai" (You can't really say that it's truly invisible), but that's not quite what you're saying in English.

I am by no means an expert on what sounds the most natural though, but those are at least grammatically correct.

I thought I remembered reading something about that in a Japanese textbook though...that double negatives were actually okay. I'm not quite sure about this, get confirmation, but just because it's wrong in English doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong in Japanese.