Hello everyone! I recently got confused while doing my WaniKani routine. I can’t really understand the difference between 少し and 少ない. As English is not my native language, it’s sometimes a bit of a struggle for me with the explanation WaniKani is giving. When I got 少ない doing my exercises, I typed “a little” which came out to be incorrect. The correct answer would be “few”, “not much” or “not many”, which to me is the same as “a little”. I then proceed to check the examples of using both of 少し and 少ない, and it was even more confusing.
Do you think there may be an explanation of the difference between these two words? Could it be that 少ない is a negative adjective because of the -ない ending? How do I remember the difference?
Thank you, I would be really grateful to get any answer
少し is an adverb, it’s a word that describes a verb. 動く = he moves; 少し動く = he moves a little
少ない is an adjective, it describes a noun. For this particular adjective, a collective or plural noun. 人がいる = there are people here; 少ない人がいる = there are few people here. Using “a little people here” would be incorrect English. The ～ない ending of 少ない isn’t actually a negative ending - likely it’s an etymological holdover from an older form.
Thank you! I think it’s more clear to me now, but I guess I have to review “a little” and “few” English grammar to make it easier
But the “adverb - adjective” part is really helpful to understand the difference, I haven’t paid much attention to it.
Thank you very much for your response!
You can’t modify 人 with 少ない like that to mean “few people”. If you want to say there aren’t many people that’s 人が少ない, like @vanilla says. (This isn’t a “wrong part of speech” issue, it’s just “this particular word doesn’t work that way”.)
You can say eg 友達が少ない人 “people with few friends” and similar things. I think (but am not totally sure) that 少ない人 would have to mean “people with few Xs” where X is a subject of the subordinate clause that was omitted because it was obvious in context, e.g. in this opener to an article about household clutter 自宅に物が多いのはなぜ？物が多い人と少ない人の４つの思考の違いを解説します the 少ない人 is implicitly (物が)少ない人.
As @pm215 said, while this part wasn’t grammatically incorrect, it would raise the question of 何が少ない？ It could be any variety of things, 友達、拘り、etc and omitted if obvious in context but none of them would achieve the desired meaning.
