分かる vocabulary meaning

I know what the person who translated 分かる as ‘to understand’ was thinking, but isn’t it a bit silly to not accept ‘to know’, when the literal example given by the site translates it as ‘to know’?

“おいしいかどうか分かりません。I don’t know if this tastes good.”

Clearly it doesn’t mean ‘I don’t understand if this tastes good’.

It seems like this word is so blatantly used as ‘to know’ that it’s a bit silly to deny it on some minor technicality. And yes I have added know as a user synonym. :slight_smile:

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Well, yes, and no. (At least, in my limited experience.) I would interpret the sentence to mean something like, “I don’t know if this tastes good,” with the possible indication they might be undecided. But, without context, there’s no real way to know (or should that be “to understand”?). :wink:


You might want to take a look at this thread. In summary, I’d stick with “to understand” due to the connotation 分かる appears to carry with it.

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I remember asking my japanese coworker why she used 分からない instead of 知らない when she didn’t know the price of a bento that I was going to have to pay for out of pocket. She told me it’s because there was no way of knowing until we received the confirmation call from the place offering bentos.

It seems like there needs to be a specific way of the person is supposed to know, and if they don’t know, then it’s 知らない.
However, if they aren’t suppposed to know something, maybe the price changed from last time or like how the food was prepared, or maybe this is the first time they’ve eaten such a food, and so they can’t comment from previous knowledge of how this food is suppposed to taste, they would use 分からない instead.

It’s confusing in this aspect only however, outside of the negative use, it is very well understood to mean “to understand”.

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My understanding is that this is exactly why 知らない can be rude in some contexts. If a teacher, or a co-worker, or someone like that is somehow responsible for you knowing the thing, then 知らない implies something like “how am I supposed to know, no one told me?” Which is of course insulting to the person who (supposedly) told you.

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I thought this was going to deal more with the transitivity of “understand” and the intransitivity of わかる. That’s more my beef with it. My understanding of 分かる tends to translate it as “to break down into comprehensible parts” with respect to the topic. That is, a sentence like:
日本語が分かる。 translates to “Japanese breaks down into comprehensible parts (for me, the assumed topic since no one else has been designated with は.”

Whether true or not, I was told this was actually the origin of 分かる and why it appears in an intransitive/transitive pair with 分ける.

A gloss like “understand” seems to lead the learner astray about how actually to use the verb. It leaves the learner with questions like, “Why is Japanese the subject of the verb in 日本語が分かる?” and often leaves them with answers like, “Japanese is just weird and hard to understand I guess.”

That said, the わからない/しらない conversation is interesting. I concur with superelf and kewms as I have heard and experienced somewhat similar things.

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For some reason, 分かる was the one verb where the difference in transitivity between the English and Japanese verbs never really bothered me in translation. The English gloss is used extremely similarly, at least where I lived growing up, to the Japanese concept, so it’s always just felt the same. So, that didn’t even occur to me… :man_shrugging:

But, I really like the idea of associating it with breaking up into parts, especially given the kanji. Thanks!

In English we use know to mean both to comprehend and to be aware of, though. ‘I don’t know Japanese’ means that you are unable to comprehend it. Yet you can also say ‘I don’t know when he will arrive’. Your ability to comprehend isn’t in question, it’s simply something that is unknown to you. So we regularly use ‘know’ for both purposes without issue.

I can understand that the nuances are more detailed in Japanese, but applying a nuance to English that doesn’t exist in English feels a bit facetious and arbitrary to me. Is it correct to say 分かる means ‘to know’ in a vast variety of contexts? It’s such a common translation across all media that the answer must clearly be yes, it’s obviously a valid translation, to an extent that it feels artificial to not accept it.

Subtleties of Japanese that don’t apply well to English don’t seem like a good reason to reject a valid English translation. If a subtlety in Japanese exists, that seems like something to mention during the lesson with some trivia, not to make a stand over via only accepting 1 answer during reviews.

To be clear, I’m not angry by any means, it just felt like a quirk that was worth bringing up. :laughing:

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Very interesting!

Why haven’t they added “to have a clue” or “to pick up what someone is putting down” yet? This is ridiculous.

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I feel like the reason why they don’t teach the subtleties is because not everyone here is studying Japanese for the same reason. You might never come into contact with this specific subtlety unless you go talk to other people, and in the big picture, if you start to pick up on these, that’s wonderful!! but also means you’re treading into advanced Japanese waters. For beginners it’s best to keep thing simple instead of throwing a bunch of very tiny things in.

If you want to add that synonym go for it, but I don’t think it’s worth it to know this very small insider knowledge right away. I think it’s more important to know that 分かる’s first meaning really means “to understand”

Jisho has the “I know!” meaning on the third descriptor for 分かる but that’s only used as a meaning when talking with friends about experiences like “You know how in the morning you wake up and you don’t want to leave the bed?” あ、分かる!

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I agree that it’s not a good reason to reject a translation. But, in my opinion, it can be a good reason to reject a gloss. And, I generally suggest people learn glosses, since semantics are sometimes divided up in “unexpected” ways in different languages.

But, as that’s my opinion, feel free to ignore it. :slight_smile:

P.S. This opinion comes from my experience with classmates. Those who tried to learn translations usually had a lot of trouble actually learning the language. Those who tried learning glosses, usually learned much quicker. But, that was only usually, (most knew the technical differences among glosses, translations, and meanings already) so YMMV, as they say. :man_shrugging:


Fair enough, but I feel I should mention the following, as a reminder that different places have different conventions, even in the same language:

The nuance did exist for one of the locales where I grew up. Saying “to know” for “to understand” (comprehension, rather than knowledge) was treated the same way as some people treat saying “can” for “may”.

I’ll admit that it’s quite unusual, especially in casual English. But, it did exist, nonetheless, and because of that, I was caught off-guard after I’d moved and heard “to know” used for “to understand” without it getting corrected in a context where people in my previous locale would have done so.

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THIS! It took me so long to figure out why my Japanese teachers would correct me in cases like that.

As a side note, while doing a bit of digging on this, I found this youtube video that I like for explaining a bit more of the nuance in ()りません vs ()かりません specifically:

It doesn’t cover all possible situations, but does clarify the general distinction to be aware of.

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