How would I go about saying something like “It’s been a pretty long time since I was last sick”?
I came up with…
病気がある時からの間は長いです。
But I don’t think it’s correct, right? How can I better explain such a sentence in Japanese?
Perhaps the て以来 grammar point?
病気があって以来、
Actually, maybe it should be 病気以来
I’ll ask a native speaker in a bit.
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Not really sure which would be the most natural ways to write the first part, but you can use ～久しぶりだ・ですto express something you haven’t done or haven’t happened in a long while.
EDIT: See Lucas and gooseking’s posts below.
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You can also use this for a specific amount of time, as in 「最後に会ったのは三年ぶり」
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I would phrase it this way:
最後の病気になったときは長い間だ。
久しぶり has the implication that you’re sick again, so it wouldn’t be appropriate in this case. (Unless that’s the intended still of the speaker).
I’m sure it’s not the most natural way of putting it, but the message clear grammatically.
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Instinctively, rather than saying how long it’s been since the last time, I’d want to say how long the negative has been true, e.g.: 五年間に病気になっていない。
You can’t use 久しぶり for the reason @LucasDesu says, but that’s because of the ぶり part, which means “first time in…”: you can still use 久しい (or probably the adverbial form 久しく since time tends to act like an adverb): 久しく病気になっていない seems to make sense.
But I guess you could also say something like 病気になった前回はずっと前だ。
最後 means ‘last’ as in ‘final’, rather than ‘previous’, which probably isn’t what the speaker means (I don’t think anyone assumes that they will never get sick again, or at least they don’t say so), but I think this works quite well if you use 前回 instead.
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No suggestions using 病む? Is that one of those “people don’t speak this way”-words some criticise wk for teaching.
Actually this could be interpreted as “previous” as well. Since I paired it with の, the combined meaning could also refer to the last item (or instance) in an order of things as well as the very final instance of something. I do concede the 前回 is a good choice to use as well, I chose 最後の because I’ve heard it used more often than 前回 in conversations I’ve had with people.
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Now that you say that, I can see how that makes sense (and if I’d bothered to look it up in the dictionary, I wouldn’t have to). Even if it’s not the last ever ever, it is the last ever so far, which makes sense to say in Japanese because it’s speech-time-relative.
And in English, too, I guess. I never really thought of ‘last’ as being “last so far”.
ahh that’s a useful grammar point, thanks~
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