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Example sentences:

ぜんぜん長い手紙を書かないようになった。

ぜんぜん長い手紙を書かなくなった。

My Translation: I never write long letters anymore.

I believe they both mean the same thing but there's obviously some difference
I don't know about.
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2014-06-08T14:08:17.873
16328
2014-06-08T23:28:49.010
4463
question
grammar translation meaning conjugations
Difference between 書かないようになった and 書かなくなった?
I think they have the same meaning. The basic difference is that 〜ようになる is
commonly used after positive verbs, while 〜くなる is commonly used for negative
verbs.

Why? Well, negative verbs are morphologically shaped like adjectives, so they
have the shorter 〜くなる form available, and that's what people use 99% of the
time. That's not possible with positive verbs, so for those people use 〜ようになる
instead--for example, 「見えるようになる」.

To get some numbers to back this up, I searched the [_Balanced Corpus of
Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ)_](http://www.kotonoha.gr.jp/shonagon/)
using the freely available 少納言 tool. Here's what I found:

```

      なくなる　　　　  6527 results　　
      ないようになる　  49 results 
```

In other words, the short form 〜なくなる is over a hundred times more common!

In contrast, there are 6513 results for ようになる alone. If you search for this
phrase, you'll see that the vast majority of the time, it's used after
positive verbs.

(Note: To reduce false positives, I typed `[^がもは少危]$` into the 前文脈 ("preceding
context") field. This filtered out results like 少なくなる or 〜がなくなる and focused
the results on verbs. If you'd like to get the same numbers I did, you'll need
to do the same.)
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-06-08T15:44:14.990
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2014-06-08T23:28:49.010
2014-06-08T23:28:49.010
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answer