A short follow up to last week’s post on 助かりました. The present tense of this verb is also incredibly useful. The key is to remember that the present tense (助かる or 助かります) is the same thing as the future tense. That let’s you form patterns like this: 〜していただければ、助かります.

~ is any verb (not necessarily a する verb; the して just stands in for all verbs in the example) that you are having done for you. The subject of the ~ is another person. You, the speaker, are the subject of いただければ, which is the conditional tense (?) of いただく.

Looking at it literally we have, “If I could receive you doing ~, I will be helped (in the future).” In normal English, “I would really appreciate it if you could ~.”

A couple examples:

8時に起こしていただければ、助かります。
I would really appreciate it if you could wake me up at 8.

今日中に出していただければ、助かります。
It would be great if you could turn it in at some point today.

大きい声で読んでいただければ、皆助かります。
It would help everyone if you could read in a loud voice. (Threw a 皆 up there to vary the subject a bit.)

You can even use an energetic 助かります！ right after you’ve made a request to soften said request. (Effective when combined with a frowny face.) Kind of a reverse airbag expression.

In the future once you’ve been assisted, you can then say 助かりました！

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 6:30 am and is filed under polite, receiving, requesting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.