I am curious whether it's just my brain that doesn't work right

[dr4b]

You're describing your travel experience to someone... which of these sentences would you SAY? As in, speaking, not as in writing an email/etc -- you're at the office or somewhere talking to somebody. Assume that you actually have the experience of travelling to France and Spain at some point in your life, and someone's asking you about what countries you have the experience of travelling to or plan to travel to.

(oh, and assume appropriate abbreviation, ie, "I've" instead of "I have", if that helps.)

[Poll #1413618]

And a better question: does it change if you are writing a report or article rather than just speaking?

Comments

[jayspec.livejournal.com]

"visited" doesn't sound bad or unnatural (at least not to me) but "to be" would be the verb I'd naturally pull out of my toolkit in this case.

[dr4b]

I guess here's the thing:

If someone comes up to me to talk to me on the subway and is practicing their English and says "Where are you from? Oh, Seattle? I have visited Seattle once! The weather was very rainy."

...I understand what they're saying, but my immediate thought is "You are speaking very good Textbook English, sir, and my guess is that you did not spend a LONG time in the USA."

Because I think that speaking naturally, most of us would say "Oh, Seattle! I've been there once! It rained a lot!"

[qiika.livejournal.com]

Getting rid of "have" turns your first sentence into "I visited Seattle once!" which to me sounds more natural.

[discofish.livejournal.com]

Actually your comment points out an interesting nuance to this discussion:

Have you ever been to Tokyo?
--I visited once last summer.
--I lived there for three years.
--I've been there a couple of times.

I think it's perfectly natural to use visit in its context, although it's a bit specific to ask if someone has ever visited a place...

A: I used to live in Tokyo when I was young.
B: Have you been back to visit?

[chamois.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to jump on this bandwagon (which I am not quite sure how to express in the poll).

I've been to France.
I visited France.
I've seen France.
I've taken a trip to France.
all have subtly different meanings and they can all be useful in spoken English.

Somehow "I've / I have visited France" seems less appropriate for spoken English than without the "have." I think it might have something to do with when I would use "visit." Specifically, I think I would be most likely to use it when telling a story. I forget the various tenses, but I have foo isn't the past tense you usually use for telling a story.

[katybeth]

But if he said, "I visited Seattle once," would that be as bad?

[dr4b]

It's not as bad but it still sounds weird to me. At least, I wouldn't say it. I think I'd actually say "oh, cool, I went to Seattle once..." or "I took a trip to Seattle last year," or more like that.

[katybeth]

Yeah, "visited" would not be my verb of choice, but I don't think it would sound weird to hear. (Or maybe it would.)

But either way, "I have [verbed] before" or "I [verbed] once." If you say "I have [verbed] once" it emphasizes "exactly once."

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

That's because you're not pretentious enough. You need to use more polysyllabic latinate words. :P (I mean, "I visited Seattle once" sounds much better to me than "I went to Seattle once", if only because it also implies your final destination (Seattle) and purpose (visitation).)

[februaryfour]

The "once" makes a difference. You wouldn't say "Oh, I visited Seattle!"

[katybeth]

In spoken English, I would nearly always use "I've" in these sentences for "I have."

The first two assert that yes, there exists a time when I went to France, but I would not use them for talking about a specific trip.

The future ones are not quite proper, I think. Proper future tense would be "I will be going to/visiting..." or "I am going to go to/visit..." But what you wrote is very common and accepted phrasing.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Speaking: All but the last two are unnatural, because nobody doesn't contract I've and I'm.

Writing: They're all fine, though I wouldn't use 'have visited' for the past ones unless it was in response to a question or comment that used 'visited'. For the future ones I would use it, but in the sense that visiting is touring, sightseeing, and enjoying myself, whereas merely going to (or staying in) France could be for business, a conference, transit through an airport, or anything including the boring and mundane.

[dr4b]

Yeah, that's kind of why I added the note at the top like "assume appropriate abbreviation", because I can't actually change the poll.

Can you remember anything we learned in early Japanese class that turned out later to be totally blatantly NOBODY-SAYS-THIS-IN-ACTUAL-SPEECH kind of stuff?

If anything, actually, I am kind of weirded out when I realize that we learned 会う for meeting people and visiting people, and I don't remember learning 訪れる. Or am I just forgetting?

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Can you remember anything we learned in early Japanese class that turned out later to be totally blatantly NOBODY-SAYS-THIS-IN-ACTUAL-SPEECH kind of stuff?

There are a decent number of things we learned (eg, adjくありません, 〜ませんでした,たくさん, はいお陰さまで) that almost never show up actual normal conversation or even writing, however, they start showing up much more frequently when in a keigo mode and are consequently not totally useless. Not sure if that counts.

IIRC we never learned 訪れる--it was always 行く. Likely because 行く (and Verbに行く) was far more generally applicable. However, I get the impression that standard Japanese English-teaching emphasizes memorizing lots and lots of words and additionally preferring specific, easy-to-translate words over general multi-use ones. (And goodness help them when they have to deal with prepositional verbs.)

Edit: Ack, I just realized that you compared it to 会う, not 行く. We did use 会う and never learned 訪ねる, but I'm not sure we ever used 会う for 'visit'--I think we were never in a situation where we needed to say we were visiting a person at their house and couldn't use 話しに行く or some similar construction. (BTW, おとずれる = to visit a place, たずねる = to visit a person. Same kanji, different okurigana.)

[dr4b]

Yeah, that is true, I was pretty sure we'd never learned 訪れる, which is the "visit" word in question here.

I had a student ask me last week why there are so many uses for the word "like". "Why isn't it just '好き'? I like steak?"

I guess the thing is, there are definitely some words that I feel like I learned incorrectly early on in Japanese, got the patterns in my head, and now they are fucking up my ability to say some things properly. Like we were taught ひどい means rude, I think... which is not true, the right word is 失礼. And apparently 会う is really "see" and not "meet".

OH! One big one is that we seriously never learned しゃべる for speaking but I swear that's actually what most people use for it instead of 話す or 言う. Like for "What did you say?" people seem to use 何をしゃべった？ Things like that.

I dunno, though, it's hard to learn everything. The other day a girl said to me お家は？ for "where do you live?" but my brain heard "an uchiwa?"

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Ask the student why there are so many uses for the word まじ. :)

I don't remember being taught ひどい at all. We did get 失礼, but only in the set-phrase for entering/leaving a room. 会う is just a pretty broad word, and different of the kanji for it (会逢遇遭) have different connotations, and trying to map it to exactly one word in English that you can use for a guide is probably doomed.

Yeah, we learned 話す because it's the formal version of 喋る, under the "speak as inoffensively as possible" principle. I'd be extremely surprised if 言う doesn't show up at all ever, considering as how it's in so many linking and adverb phrases.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Certainly if you need to emphasize one of the contracted words (eg, in negating someone's statement) then you wouldn't contract them. And it's not improper to leave them uncontracted, it's just not usual. (Or perhaps, not 'friendly'--noncontraction is (in my dialect) a sign that one is using a higher register.)

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. Literary style does that, it being one of the higher registers I alluded to. My "Speaking:" heading was imprecise--a better tag might have been "Conversational register:".

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Yes. See my other comment to Deanna about pretentious latinate vocabulary. :)

[msde.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm weird, but they all sound fine to me. Some of them are unnecessarily formal if I'm talking to friends, but random person without context? eh. Some of them I'd never use in regular conversation, but to the grammar nazi friend of a friend, I might use them.

It's like making a Japanese version of the poll with just "Which of these would you say to someone?"

[dr4b]

Right, exactly, it's a matter of what is written English and what is spoken.

Since I am supposed to teach "conversation", it seems bad for me to reinforce things that we don't actually SAY...

[teravell.livejournal.com]

I might even go so far as to say "I went to _____" -- especially in the last sentence. "On my trip to Europe, I went to France and Spain." Yeah. Visit? Maybe in a job application essay.

[the2belo.livejournal.com]

What she said. "Visit" is written English, not spoken.

[lifeofmendel.livejournal.com]

for the the concept of "visiting" has more to do with people or landmark places as opposed to 'locations'. i don't say "i visited france" as much as i'll say "i visited michelle in france."

sometimes i'll use the term 'visit' for a location if it's an inbetween, as in 'i'm visiting eugene on my way to hawaii' if hawaii is my main destination. i wouldn't say, 'i'm visiting hawaii.'

[dr4b]

I said something like that to the teacher this morning -- like maybe "I visited the Tokyo Tower" but in general, "I visited my family" or "I visited Bob last week".

unfortunately, "visit" is a direct translation word for the word they actually use to mean "take a short trip to a place".

[damienroc.livejournal.com]

I think it's less "I have been/I have visited" and more "I have been/I visited". Have wouldn't be used if they're using visit.

[eiriene.livejournal.com]

I didn't check either of the last two options, but I would have said "When I was in Europe, I went to France and Spain."

[vandebeast.livejournal.com]

I'm in agreement with darknote, I tend to think of visiting as having to do with people, not places.

[dr4b]

That's what I actually told the teacher this morning -- that we usually use visit in spoken English for "i visit my family" or "i visit my friend". But I don't think it got across.

[crackoon.livejournal.com]

I answered based on the fact that you said "assume you've been to France and Spain at some point in life"
So I picked the first two and last two. If I was going to France next week I'd pick those two as well.
I probably missed the point of the poll though, I don't know whether you wanted "which sounds more natural" or "which sounds alright"

[drj36.livejournal.com]

I feel like visit is a word often used to describe another person's actions but not typically used to describe one's own actions. It's not that it's necessarily improper to use visit in reference to your own actions, just that people rarely do it in my experience. People will say "I have relatives visiting this weekend" but are more likely to say "I am going to see relatives this weekend". I could go further into depth but from there it's psychology.

[cyfis.livejournal.com]

RE: writing/speaking difference, absolutely. "I have visited..." sounds too formal for speech, though I can see it accepted in writing. There's nothing wrong with it par se, just not what I would naturally come up with. Except the last one, where it seems the more natural of the two options.

[mh75.livejournal.com]

You know, i might say 'on a recent visit to France'... That sounds a lot more natural than any of the other visit constructions above.

[drj36.livejournal.com]

I agree. I was going to mention that visit being used as a noun is a lot more common than it being used as a verb (particularly in first person).