LEARN + JAPANESE / Note 90 JLPT N4

I Want You To (〜てほしい)

てほしい attaches to a verb’s て-form and expresses a wish about someone else’s action, what you want them to do, not what you yourself want to do.

In Real Life
The person you want something from is marked with に, not は or が. This lines up with たい, which you already know describes wanting to do something yourself, while てほしい flips the direction: someone else is the one doing the action, and に marks who that someone else is.
In Real Life
ほしい conjugates like any other い-adjective attached at the end, ほしくない for the negative, ほしかった for the past, ほしくなかった for the past negative, exactly the pattern you already learned for 欲しい itself.

Vocabulary

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