Is the conditional form of a verb treated like a regular verb or a noun/na-adjective?

Question

First of all thanks to everyone helping me out here, i'm already feeling some progress on the learning process, of course there’s a lot of room to improve, but sure it is nice to feel some progress every now and then ^^.

Now to my question, I was going to make a sentence to ask a friend of mine about a grammar point “The difference between using なんです or just です at the end of a sentence” so I came up with this sentence(which brought me another grammar doubt about the conditional form):

“If someone ask me ‘Felipe, where are you going?’ so, I said ‘I am going to work’ or ‘I am going to work’(don’t know how to express なんです in English). What’s the difference between these sentences?”

誰かが僕に「フェリペがどこに行っていますの?」と問えばなので、僕は「仕事です」というか、「仕事なんです」というか。これらの文の違いはなんかですか？

My question is on the first part, If the first part was ending with 「問います」I know for sure that I would use 「ので」instead of 「なので]

but if I had endend with 「問いたい」I’d need to end it with 「なので」because it understood as an i-adjective.

What about the 「問えば」 ending, do I treat it as a verb or a noun/na-adjective? Therefore should I use 「なので」or 「ので」?

I’m sorry for the really long question, I hope I was clear enough, if you could help me in any mistakes on the sentence overall, I’d be grateful!

Thanks a Lot!

Answer 1

I'll try to limit my answer to your question about what to do with「～ば」and 「ので・なので」

• 問{と}う as I'm sure you know, means "to ask a question" (like on a test)

• 問えば means "(if) a question were asked" (The 仮定形 of 問う is 問え and then you add the 助詞「ば」to indicate something like, "if it were the case that...")

• ので・なので generally mean "because" or "as a result" in English.

The problem is that 「ば」is a conjunction (接続助詞) and「ので・なので」is also a conjunction. This means that they can't be used next to one another grammatically.

Your original example sentence has a similar problem with the English grammar. I remember you said a while ago that English isn't your native language so I'm not trying to criticize you at all, you've obviously worked hard to use English so well :)

“If someone asked/asks me "Felipe, where are you going?", so I said "I am going to work" or "I am going to work". What’s the difference between these sentences?”

You can make this clause using "if" or using "so", but you can't use both in the same clause this way.

So, the following are OK in English:

• If someone asks me "Felipe, where are you going?", and I say "I am going to work" (then) ...
• Someone asked me "Felipe, where are you going?", so I said "I am going to work".

Likewise, the following are OK in Japanese:

• 生年月日を問われれば… "If I were asked my birth date, ..."
• 生年月日を問われたので… "I was asked my birth date, so..."

But you can't use these two words together like in the OP example sentence.