Other’s Desires: ～がる

We need to be careful when talking about other people’s emotions or feelings—I’m talking grammatically here. Japanese makes a distinction between what you know based on direct experience and what you believe based on judgement. When we’re talking about other people’s emotions and feeling only the latter applies—we cannot know directly how someone feels because we cannot be them. In English, we sometimes make this distinction with words like “seem” or “look”:

But in other cases it makes no difference whether we’re talking about our own desires or someone else’s.

Japanese requires this distinction to be made, and to do so we turn adjectives into verbs with 〜がる.

• For i-adjectives we replace the い with がる.
• For na-adjectives we simply add がる.

Note that this does not apply to ALL adjectives—only those that pertain to feelings and emotions (as all three of the above do).

Because our former adjectives are now working as verbs the object particle を is required.

〜がる is often used with the “want” form of verbs which, as we know, behave like adjectives.

The grammatical rules are that we can’t make a definitive statement about someone else’s feelings or desires without using 〜たがる. We can, however, say the following:

Here we are not making a definitive statement about his desires—just quoting what he said.

Because we use らしい to infer that it’s something we’ve heard the use of たい is acceptable.