I was interested to see that there is a word that means “inside a car”. Based on the (limited amount of) grammar I’ve seen so far, I would have expected that to be constructed just like any other postposition location word, i.e. 車の内.
Does the latter exist? If so, is there any difference in meaning? If not… why not? And are there any other set words referring to thing + relative location where the standard grammar would not apply?
Just because you can make a word in kanji form doesn’t mean that it’s always the most natural to use. It depends on the context.
That being said, I don’t think 車の内 sounds all that natural to me. I would say 車の中 if I was just talking to someone about the inside of a car.
車内 is the kind of thing I’d expect on a plaque telling people that doing X within a train or something is prohibited. Note that 車内 can be applied to buses and trains, not just 車. To say “inside a train car” with the phrase form, you’d say 車両の中.
So I’m guessing it’s kind of the same thing with this “chariot” and 電車?
As in, why 車両の中 instead of 電車の中?
Then again, when learning English it’s kind of weird to get used to saying: “don’t do that on the train” instead of “don’t do that in the train”. It would make more sense to prohibit a certain thing “inside” rather than “on top of”…
They just don’t mean the same thing. A 電車 is the whole thing. It is comprised of individual 車両. As far as passengers are concerned, I suppose there’s no difference, but they aren’t the same thing.
That all makes sense! I feel like prepositions/postpositions are often the most difficult parts to learning a language, since they’re usually very irregular and don’t always fit “logically” with what you’d expect.
Thanks for the explanation!
I am SO very glad that I’m not the only one that has started double-tapping all of my syllable-final N’s…
Double n is vital to survive in WK国
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