I found that this is one of the few times when a kanji is used that it can confuse you versus using hiragana. When using 方, I find myself confusing it with stem+方 (かた), for some reason, even though when you see がいい, it shouldn't.
When looking through the user sentences, I noticed some that had the negative past form of a verb before 方が. Isn't the verb preceding 方がいい in a negative statement always in present-tense?
e.g., 彼女の料理についてとてもどぎまぎだから、冗談しなかった方がいい。 The end should be: 冗談しない方がいい。 Right?
Yes, you're right. the いい part can be changed to the past to refer to an opinion that happened in the past, but I don't think I've ever heard it the way that sentence is written.
I think the negative ない方がいい should also be included here, couldn't find it elsewhere on the site. Not sure if both are part of N4 though, although we did study both together pretty early on.
I think the negative ない方がいい should also be included here, couldn't find it elsewhere on the site. Not sure if both are part of N4 though, although we did study both together pretty early on.
It's just the formation of the grammar - the phrase as a whole can refer to something in the past/present/future, but it's the いい that would be adjusted to a different tense.
If you want to break it down into more atomic units, it uses the past tense of the form to describe that it (the situation) would be good after doing that action.
