In my trusty grammar dictionary (and also everywhere else in I’ve looked) どころか is described as “an expression indicating that something is very far from an expected state”
スミスさんは日本語の新聞が読めるどころか、平仮名も知らない
Smith is far from being able to read Japanese newspapers, he can’t even read hiragana.
However… It also goes on to use 出来ない in examples, where the meaning of どころか switches between “not just unable” and “far from unable” depending on whether the second half of the sentence is positive or negative:
スミスさんは漢字が書けないどころか、平仮名も書けない
スミスさんは日本語が書けないどころか,日本語で小説が書けるぐらいだ
On first reading, the above examples sound like the first half of the sentence is posing a question that’s answered in the second half: “Is Smith unable to write kanji? He can’t even write hiragana.”, “Is Smith unable to write Japanese? He can even write a Japanese novel.”
This is mostly because it looks like どころ + か to me, I guess.
Anyway, is treating it like a question/answer statement likely to lead to misreading, or can I just carry on with the officially wrong interpretation and get the correct meaning?
And to me that’s basically consistent with the English description you mentioned (as in, I don’t think they contradict each other anywhere), though I guess framed a little differently.
Is it that you feel like the English translations should always be consistent? I would recommend not filtering everything back through English.
I guess I’m not sure if I’m grasping what the issue you have is.
I remember learning ちなみに – the worksheet had ten example sentences using it, and the natural English translation seemed to be different for every single one
That definition seems to contradict the example sentences, because in those the second clause can both negate affirm the the first clause.
So, “a conjunction in which the first clause proposition is emphatically negated or affirmed by the second clause”[1] is what it looks like to me, reading the examples.
Rather than, “something being far from the expected state”. Or just negating a proposition.
What I’m asking is, is [1] wrong, am I just misreading the examples?
The Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese entry for this has a lot of examples and a little chart of various affirmative/negative options for the S1 and S2. It defines it as marking that the real S2 is far from the expected/suggested state S1; as you note we can be far from that S1 state in either direction.
It is a bit misleading I think, because it says (S1)を否定する. In an example like クラークさんは刺し身が食べられるどころか、納豆まで食べられる。from the DoIJG, clearly we’re not literally denying S1 and saying Mr Clarke can’t eat sashimi. I think it would be clearer to say that we’re stating that S1 is not the right way to describe the situation, because the reality is a long way away from that. (Obviously it often is the case that we are literally denying S1 as well, but not always.)
I think this suggested definition is a bit off the mark, because the conjunction is never emphatically affirming the first clause. It’s either saying “it’s very wrong” or “it’s badly understating the actual situation”.
Yeah; I’m just saying that in a second language learning context a less concise definition is more helpful; this one kind of requires you to already know how the word can be used to correctly interpret the definition…
