“I've never eaten Japanese food.” in Urdu: “میں نے کبھی جاپانی کھانا نہیں کھایا۔”

When to use it

Use it when someone offers you a dish and you want to say you have never tried that kind of food.

“I've never eaten Japanese food.” — The sentence in English

In “I've never eaten Japanese food.” ‘I've’ is ‘I have’ plus the participle ‘eaten’: a present perfect about life experience. ‘never’ is already negative, so no ‘not’.

I

pronounpersonal pronoun, always written with a capital letter

've

auxiliary verbhave · tense: present · person: first · number: singular · short form of "have"; with "eaten" it talks about life experience up to now

never

adverbadverb of frequency

eaten

verbeat · form: past participle · irregular verb: eat, ate, eaten

Japanese

adjectiveadjective of nationality, always capitalised in English

food

nounnoun

“میں نے کبھی جاپانی کھانا نہیں کھایا۔” — The sentence in Urdu

In “میں نے کبھی جاپانی کھانا نہیں کھایا۔” the perfective of the transitive verb کھانا (to eat) makes the subject take ‘نے’ (میں نے), so the verb ‘کھایا’ agrees with the object ‘کھانا’ (food, masculine). ‘کبھی … نہیں’ means ‘never’, and in negatives Urdu usually drops ‘ہے’.

میں

pronounpronoun 'I'

نے

prepositionergative نے: marks the subject of a transitive verb in the perfective

کبھی

adverbwith نہیں it means 'never'

جاپانی

adjectiveadjective 'Japanese'

کھانا

nounmasculine noun 'food'; the verb agrees with it

نہیں

adverbnegation

کھایا

verbکھانا · aspect: perfective · gender: masculine · number: singular · because of نے it agrees with کھانا; in negatives ہے is usually dropped

English × Urdu: What changes from one language to the other

English needs one word, ‘never’; Urdu needs ‘کبھی’ plus ‘نہیں’. The ergative ‘نے’ has no English equivalent: here the Urdu verb follows the object, not the subject.

Example conversation