First of all, these questions are a bit related but not what I'm actually asking about:
- Is “I just spent all my money” grammatically incorrect?
- “I just ate them” and “I've just eaten them” - What's the difference in American and in British?
- When is the present perfect tense used instead of the past tense?
And this answer to the second question as well as its comment does indicate the problem I'm continually encountering.
I tend to overuse the word just. Sometimes I don't even recognize it but if I carefully re-read my English I often find sentences like:
- I've just implemented the method.
- I've just eaten an apple.
- I've just closed my eyes for a few seconds.
The problem is, that in all these sentences I don't want to emphasize that I did that recently, just a couple of seconds/minutes ago, or that it might have any connection to the present, i.e. my present actions, although the action indeed just happened of late (and that's why I use the perfect).
In these cases just is meant to be simply or only:
A: Are you gonna eat with us to lunch now?
B: Sure, I only ate an apple and now I'm really hungry.
A: Are you tired?
B: No, I simply closed my eyes for a few seconds trying to focusing on the issues.
While these two sentences are just examples I invented for this question, the first sentence I introduced above is one of those I actually wrote. Regarding this first example, I consulted an American colleague and asked him how would he interpret the sentence
- I just implemented the method.
and he answered:
When a native English speaker reads that, they do not understand the 'just' to mean that you recently performed the action - they understand it to me that you 'simply' performed the action. It gives the connotation that you could have done more if you had spent more time on it, but getting it done quickly and easily was more important to you.
So far I'm happy with this answer, but I still have some further questions:
How do British natives interpret that, especially when using the perfect?
How do you (Briton or American) emphasize the other meaning, i.e.
- if you understand just as recently do you use only (which sounds somehow awkward to me in sentences in perfect tense) or do you rephrase the sentence as I did with the invented examples, or
- if you understand just as only how do you then emphasize recently?
The main purpose of this question is to find out if I should put more focus on phrasing these kind of sentences, i.e. using simple past even for an action happened just now when I want to emphasize only, or if I can go ahead using this sentence structure.