Please excuse me if this is a silly question. But I’m having a little trouble deciding when I should use these two.
I think じゃないか is used for ‘didn’t’ and じゃなかったか is used by for ‘wasn’t’. But are ‘didn’t’ and ‘wasn’t’ both past tense?
I thought this was a casual “isn’t it?”
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I think the English translations you suggest aren’t really right, and I suspect you’re getting confused by the way じゃないか can be used as a “tag question”.
In a sentence like だから言ったじゃないか the natural English is “I told you so, didn’t I?”, but this is because in English we make the tense of the tag match the tense of the main verb. In Japanese you don’t have to do that – the “told you” is in the past because the 言った is past tense, but the fact that that happened is still true right here right now, so the tag じゃない is present tense. You can also use this present-tense tag with a main verb in the present tense, and then the natural English is something else; the link has examples.
On the other hand, for a situation like where we’ve agreed to meet at 4.30, but then you send me an email where you say it’s 4.00, I might say 4時半からじゃなかったか. The natural English is “wasn’t it 4.30?”, but that doesn’t just mean “じゃなかった == wasn’t” (though as it happens the plain meaning of じゃなかった often does translate as that). What’s happening here (in both languages) is you’re looking back at the past and saying “in the past when we talked about it it was 4.30, I thought, but seems like it’s not now?”, so the past tense gets used. (Edit: fixed mistake in this example!)
It’s probably better not to try to keep specific English equivalents in your head for this sort of idiomatic pattern. Aim to understand the meaning and look at what tenses are used in the pattern. Often Japanese uses verb tense differently to English and so a natural translation ends up with the equivalent verbs in different tenses sometimes.
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じゃないかじゃなかったっけ
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