Meaning and how to use たら in Japanese

たら is used in Japanese as a conditional. It means ‘if.. then, when or after’. It’s used in sentences like: If I do that, then I can do this. 

How to use it:

In which たら can be seen after a verb, noun or adjective: 

So if you apply this, you get:

So just to breakdown what happens here, たべたら is made up out of the past version of たべる which is たべた and a ら at the end of it, making たべたら. Same holds for のむ of which のんだ is the past version. If you forgot how to conjugate verbs to their casual form, recap here. Same holds for やさしかった, which is the past tense for やさしい. You can practice the conjugation of adjectives again in this article. 

You can see what we’ve just learned in a sentence below:

Negative form of たら

Sometimes off course you want to make a negative conditional. ‘if you don’t do this, you won’t get this’ or something along these lines. So, there is a logical way to do this. You learned above that to make a positive conditional you use the positive past casual form of a verb. To make a negative conditional you use the negative past casual form. The same goes for the nouns and adjectives. The だったら that you saw earlier comes from です, so we have to get the past negative of です. This is じゃなかった as you can see in this lesson about です. The past negative of an い adjective is くなかった. Both get an extra ら to make it a conditional. 

For the verbs that you saw above, 

And with this we can make sentences like these: 

More examples