After a few years I’m working my way through Wanikani, currently on level 15. One thing I noticed is that there seem to be a lot of Vocab words that have “Action” as it’s primary or secondary definition. So far I’ve encountered:
活動 - かつどう, 事 - こと, 行動 - こうどう, 仕草 - しぐさ, 作用 - さよう.
All these words can mean “action” and I’m sure there are more that I haven’t came across yet. I was wondering if someone could explain how I would know which vocab to use in different scenarios or any explanation of why there are so many ways to say such an abstract word.
Half of those don’t really mean “action” as their central meaning, though there are contexts where that would be the natural translation
事 is more like “thing”
仕草’s main meaning is “gesture, movement, mannerism”
活動 is usually actions in the sense of activities, like club or union activities
作用 is like physics action (as opposed to reaction)
But more generally you figure out which one to use by seeing them in context, where you see what kind of sentence they’re used in, which nouns go with which verbs, and so on.
It’s not so much that Japanese has a lot of synonyms for a particular abstract word, and more that different languages divide up the space of meanings differently, so in this case there are several different words that might be used where English has different senses of a single word, but in other cases it will be Japanese that has a word that covers a concept that English has split between multiple words.
活動 is an activity you do, like a hobby. Generally, a hobby you take very seriously. Often to an extent that could almost be considered professional/for pay. Like a streamer I know is currently on hiatus, 活動休止 (There’s other forms too, like in business sense, but this is the main one I usually see) 事 is also a “thing.” But depending on context it could be an action related to what it’s paired with in a sentence. There’s a lot of “things” in the Japanese language across several characters basically meaning it. Like animals are just moving things. 動物. どうぶつ 行動 is action as in how you handle yourself. You know how your actions speak for you? It’s those kinds of actions. Conduct. 仕草 are mannerisms and gestures. Part of body language and movement. 作用 is more of an operation. Kind of stiff feeling language. Like how there’s multiple moves for “using” things that have their own contextual meaning in how they’re used or utilized.
The problem with English definitions of Japanese words is that Japanese and English often don’t fully overlap, so you’re going to run across a lot of words that could be translated as, or feel like, the same general concept despite being quite different in nature. It’s why it’s a good idea to look up what words mean on jisho.org or, if possible, other places that let you find more contextual use cases.
Like content in the language itself.
A lot of the time Wanikani will have a bunch of different meanings bunched together because technically, when you pile those up into one, that’s the general direction the real meaning is in.
The real answer is that it will just take time for the words to really settle in your brain and the nuances to start making sense naturally. There’s quite a lot of vocabulary that with just Wanikani, even with its context sentences, will probably not entirely land as they should be used.
Edit selecting text to bold made it ctrl+v for some reason and messed up my post. Fixed it now.
As others have mentioned, seeing how they are used in context is the key. Have you been using the common word combos/usage and context sentences provided as part of the lessons? While not exhaustive, they are usually fairly decent at giving some sense for nuance/usage.