55511
The following is an excerpt from a dialogue between me and my language
partner.

The sentence in question needs some context.

I wrote to her about my struggles with real-time conversation. I also asked
her whether the construction I used in the respective sentence was correct or
not. The following is me telling her about my struggles and then asking her
about the grammar of my sentence:

> 私には対話で相手に自然に答えることがいつも難しいものでした (Or would it be better to say it with a verb +
> にくい“ construction/pattern: 私には対話で相手に自然に答えにくいでした)。

She replied to me quoting part of my sentence and adding her commentary:

> 「私には対話で相手に自然に答えることがいつも難しいものでした」 という文章に「にくい」を使うかどうかですが、使わない方が自然な文章になると思います。
> これが過去のことであるの **ならば** 、 「私は、対話での自然な受け答えをいつも難しいと感じました」
> でいいのではないでしょうか。「対話」と「受け答え
> "response"」という言葉で、「相手がいる」ことははっきりわかるので、「相手に」は省略して良いでしょう。

What confuses me the most is ならば, printed in **bold**. However, I'm also not
sure if I understood the rest correctly, so below I'll write down my
translation of her entire reply above:

> "Whether to use 'にくい' in the phrase 'It always was a difficult thing for me
> to reply to my partner naturally in a dialogue' or not, I think it becomes a
> more natural sentence not using it. _In case this is a thing from the past_
> , wouldn't 'I always experience a natural response in a dialogue as
> difficult' be fine as well? Because one knows clearly 'a partner exists'
> because of the words 'dialogue' and 'response', it is okay ommitting 'to the
> partner'.

What I did here was simply taking なら from [here](http://jisho.org/search/nara)
because that's the only result jisho gave me when searching for ならば. I must
also add that until now, なら was only known to me as a suffix when picking up
something up a partner in dialogue said. I thought that the conditional
semantics listed on jisho suits this case better, but I might be mistaken here
as well.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-12-28T16:18:09.720
55488
2017-12-29T09:07:23.960
2017-12-28T19:39:12.517
16159
20172
question
grammar
what does this ならば do here?
As far as I understand it, 「ならば」 is basically just a more formal/literary
「なら」. See [here](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/968/7705). I think the
only person I've ever heard use it in speech was a mathematics professor
during lectures, but it shows up in writing.

The differences in usage between conditionals in general in Japanese is a much
larger topic and has been discussed in other questions, such as [this
one](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/393/differences-
among-%E3%81%9F%E3%82%89-%E3%81%AA%E3%82%89-%E3%82%93%E3%81%A0%E3%81%A3%E3%81%9F%E3%82%89-%E3%81%88%E3%81%B0-etc),
but if you understand 「なら」 as a conditional then you should be fine with
「ならば」.

I think

> In case this is a thing from the past

is maybe not the best way to translate it, because "(just) in case" can carry
nuances of preparing for or dealing with something undesirable. I think
"If..." is fine, or if you want to use "case" and preserve the literary tone,
you can say "In the case that...", though this is a little bit verbose.

As for the rest of your translation, I think you're getting the important
stuff right. Some of the English is slightly weird, but I assume this is
intentional for the sake of a very literal translation. That said, I would
change

> 'I always experience a natural response in a dialogue as difficult'

to

> 'I always feel that natural responses in dialogue are difficult'
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-12-29T08:36:43.697
55511
2017-12-29T09:07:23.960
2017-12-29T09:07:23.960
9831
7705
55488
answer