Hello Community.
I am a bit confused as to which contexts you would use 強いvs強力 since they both mean Strong/powerful
Thanks!
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In my experience, 強力 specifically means “powerful,” or “able to wield a lot of power.”
強い is much more versatile and can modify just about anything to say it is strong or intense. For example, you can say that someone is intensely vigilant with 警戒心が強い (“their vigilance is strong.”).
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I don’t see 強力 as often as I would like to, but in my experience 強い is more generic and 強力 is more related to physical power or robustness. So you can say 強い風, but not really 強力な風.
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強い is also the more common word (jpdb top 200 vs 強力 in top 2500; ngram count says it occurs about five times more often).
The usual rule of thumb applies here: if one word is a kun-yomi reading and the other is an on-yomi kanji compound, chances are good that the kun-yomi word is the more common, more general, and more likely to be used in spoken conversation.
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Out of curiosity, what are the sources from which JPDB frequency number is calculated/determined?
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I assume it’s just “everything they have scanned”, which is almost all fiction, biased towards anime, visual novels and light novels. So it’s definitely not a super balanced corpus, but it’s a nice counterweight to the usual “heavy on newspaper articles” frequency lists.
The “ngram count” I mentioned is not from the jpdb website; that’s based on a google corpus of lots of web pages, I think.
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Thank you. I am often curious about this since I occasionally find the “A is more common than B” or “XYZ is not common” responses I see to be in contrast to my own personal experience. I expect that in general frequency in written material would be indicative of frequency in general, but then that will depend to some extent on what the collection of source material is.
Almost all of my experience is daily life conversations (home, family, work, friends and all the people or things in writing I interact with each day). The majority of my daily experience is spoken Japanese (in person, phone, web meetings, what I watch on TV) and the written Japanese I consume is not from “which is almost all fiction, biased towards anime, visual novels and light novels.”
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I would expect jpdb’s corpus to be closer to spoken language frequency than eg a newspaper biased one, because there’s a lot of dialogue in fiction.
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