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I found myself wanting to write something analogous to "if you want (some する verb) done to you"

I know the passive form of する is される.

I know that the volitional form of an ichidan verb is stem + たい. This brings me to されたい.

I know that the ば form of an い adjective drops the い and adds ければ. Hence: されたければ.

Whew. I looked this up on Google and found over 41,000 results, but that seems low for what I would assume would be an extremely common construction. My hypothesis then is that this is grammatically correct, but unnatural in most cases.

Is there a more natural way to construct the meaning of "if you want something done to you" in the general case?

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  • The volitional form is not the ~たい form. Where did you hear this? The volitional form of verbs ([意志形]{い・し・けい}) is the ~う・~よう form, like 行こう, 食べよう, などなど.
    – istrasci
    Commented Jun 26, 2015 at 2:39

2 Answers 2

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"if you want (some する verb) done to you"

As the other answerer says I think you can use 「して欲しければ」. There are a few variations:

尊敬して欲しければ
尊敬して欲しいなら
尊敬して欲しいのなら
尊敬して欲しかったら ← casual
(These are more literally like "If you want (me/someone/others) to respect you")

Of course you can also use 「されたければ...」, which is literally like "If you want to be (done~~)". There are a few variations:

尊敬されたければ
尊敬されたいなら
尊敬されたいのなら
尊敬されたかったら ← casual
(Lit. "If you want to be respected")


As a side note, されてほしい would be "want (someone) to be (done~~)." For example:

もっと評価されて欲しい作家 A writer that I want to be more highly regarded
早く逮捕されて欲しい I want (someone) to be arrested quickly

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"if you want something done to you" can be translated into "もしsomethingをして欲{ほ}しければ".

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  • Thanks, I'm a little bit puzzled about why it wouldn't be されて欲しければ but am prepared to take it for granted.
    – Aurast
    Commented Jun 26, 2015 at 2:21
  • されて欲しければis syntactically correct but means "want something done to someone else" whereas OP is asking about wanting something done to yourself.
    – dainichi
    Commented Jun 26, 2015 at 12:12
  • On second thought, I think されて欲しければ is usually used as indicated by @Choko in her append above.
    – eltonjohn
    Commented Jun 26, 2015 at 12:32

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