‘Toki Ni’ – Using ‘When’ in Japanese Sentences!

This is the first in a series of articles that will help you learn useful grammar patterns to help you master conversational Japanese much faster.

In today’s article we will see the grammatical pattern for ‘When I (verb)’ or ‘When I was a (noun)’ this is a very useful grammatical pattern, one of the first that I learned. In Japanese it is represented with ‘toki’ or ‘toki ni’.

The first thing we need to identify is which Base/Tense is used for the grammatical pattern. There are 7 bases in Japanese verbs. B1,2,3,4,5,Te,Ta. For a full explanation of the bases and detailed explanations on how to correctly conjugate verbs in Japanese, check out our guide.

This grammatical pattern uses the verb in its simple form (no conjugation except in tense). This makes it very easy to use. I will use some example sentences below to explain how to use it in various ways.

use with a verb

The verb iru (or past tense ita) goes immediately before toki ni to show that when I was in Japan I did… In this case I ate sushi.

Nihon ni ita toki ni sushi or tabeta/tabemashita.

(When I was in Japan I ate sushi)

Another example is:

Jitensha or noru toki ni herumetto or kaburu/kaburimasu.

(When I ride a bike I wear a helmet).

Again, in this example, the helmet wearing was occurring when he was riding a bike, so the Verb for Noru (to ride) comes before ‘toki ni’

See how it can be used with either tense by changing the verb before toki to its past tense.

use with an adjective

It can be used to connote when something was an adjective like loud or quiet.

Shizuka na toki ni / Shizuka datta toki ni …

(When something is/was quiet…)

When the adjective is in the present tense a ‘na’ is added between the adjective and the ‘toki ni’.

use with a noun

Watashi wa Daigakusei no /datta toki ni…

(When I am/was a college student….)

When you use it with a noun, you use the pattern above. Where NO is past tense, you put a ‘no’ between the noun and the ‘toki ni’. When it’s past tense, just use the past tense desu or da, which is datta.

Other useful notes on the ‘toki ni’ grammar pattern

You can remove the ni following toki as it creates a bit of extra emphasis that is not always necessary.

You can’t use this grammatical pattern to indicate that someone will be surprised as a result of ‘when’ they should use one of the other patterns we’ll explain later, for example BTa ra would be used.