Some help translating きゃ

Japanese Language Grammar
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As I go through the WK lessons, I typically try to read/parse as much of the example sentences as I can (absurd as they often are) as practice. I ran into this sentence fragment (from 過ごす vocab):

あのクソ暑い日をエアコン無しで過ごさなきゃならなかったんだ

It translates to:

…so we had to spend the hot day without an air‐conditioner.

I understand everything up to the きゃならなかったんだ. My knowledge of grammar is still pretty rudimentary, so bear with me. I understood 過ごさなきゃ as being “must spend time on,” and I thought ならなかった was the negative past conjugation of 成る (with explanatory んだ appended). But when I put those together, I get “we did not become that we had to spend time…”, which is the opposite of the translated meaning. I appreciate any help figuring this out!

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http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/must

The きゃ replaces ければ in this use!

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This looks like the grammar point なきゃならない.

Check out sections 2 and 4 here: Expressing “must” or “have to” – Learn Japanese

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〜なきゃ is an informal, contracted way to say “need to”.

The full form is

〜なければ + [verb in a negative form]
(“if it doesn’t 〜, it doesn’t verb”)

Examples include:
〜なければいけません
〜なければいけない
〜なければなりません
〜なければならない

What you have here is a variant of the last option, 〜なければならない, but with なければ shortened to なきゃ and ならない conjugated to ならなかった.

It’s quite literally something like:
“If we didn’t spend the hot day without an air conditioner, it wouldn’t become.”

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I used that article as reference and I think I see my mistake - I had assumed that when you shortcut with きゃ you HAVE to leave out the だめ/いけない/ならない, but now I see that the ならなかった just comes from the past conjugation of the ならない there. Rookie mistake!

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Just to add on this, the きゃ is not a part in itself. It starts from なきゃ.

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I know you already have your answer, but here’s an article filled with a bunch of these contracted forms such as the one you asked about:

Hopefully this can be helpful as you encounter more of these contractions.

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Thanks! This is very useful. I’m finding these contractions peppered everywhere in conversational dialogue and I’ve had to jump back and forth across multiple references to remember what they mean.

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Yeah, it’s a pretty nice centralized listing. It’s had pretty much every contraction I’ve encountered so far.

But, yes, I feel the pain on conversational Japanese. Between the contractions, the dropped particles, etc. it can be quite an eyeopening experience.

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What a nostalgic question. Reminds me of my time as a fresh learner: Strange conjugation 止まらなきゃ

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