もしも with たかった in past tense

Question

もしも選べるなら、男に生まれたかった。

can someone explain what does this sentence mean? I was born as a man? I choose to me a man?

Answer 1

Can someone explain what does this sentence mean?

I'll break the sentence down for you.

もしも選べるなら (1)、男に生まれたかった (2)。

Your sentence consists of two clauses, which are separated by a comma. The first clause consists of three components: an adverb (もしも), a verb in plain potential form (選べる) and なら, which, in this case, functions as a conjunction meaning if.

To create a conditional clause using なら (also called a なら clause), it must follow an adjective or verb in plain form, which it does. 選べる is in plain potential form.

Now, the second clause consists of three components as well: a common noun (男), a particle (に) and a verb (生まれたかった) in past affirmative tai-form.

The tai-form of a verb is the form you conjugate a verb into to express a desire to do something. For example, it changes 'I play football' to 'I want to play football'. To conjugate a verb into non-past affirmative tai-form we must append the suffix たい to the verb in stem-form. Once done this, to conjugate it into its past affirmative tai-form, we drop い and add かった.

The stem-form of 生まれる(to be born) is 生まれ, then append たい, so you have 生まれたい (to want to be born). We now conjugate 生まれたい into past affirmative tai-form by getting rid of い and appending かった. Finally, we have 生まれたかった (wanted to be born). As you can see, it conjugates as an i-adjective.

Note that that the verb 生まれる is intransitive and so is 生まれたかった, so it doesn't take the particle を but rather に in this case. In your sentence, the object of this verb is 男.

Knowing all the above, we could translate the sentence to:"I would have wanted to be born as male if you ask me."

We need more context for a better translation.

If you want to read more about tai-form, consult The Japanese Tai(たい) form.

Answer 2

Concatenating @Nameless's answer:

I believe this would be literally translated as, "If the choice existed, (Also seen as "If I had the choice," or "If I could choose,") I would have wanted to be born a man."

もしも is often translated as "if"

選べる is a verb that means "choice" (選択 is probably a better word to use here, since it is a noun and we are telling someone (or hearing from someone) that we wanted to have the choice, not that we wanted to have the choosing.)

なら is also often translated as "if", but can be seen as "if it is the case that", which makes it possible to translate the word/s (particle, etc. if you like) as "then" in a proper English sentence. (I believe that, according to quick Google skimming, Nameless, なら can be used with nouns as well.)

男に means at, for, to, because, by, or as (a) male/man. (As is the reading we would like in this case.

生まれたかった is the past tense version of the "desiring" or "wanting" version of the verb 生まれ, which means to be born.