Blacklist "Forceful" for 勢い

Mistaking 勢い for an i-adjective, I wrote “forceful”, and it was accepted as correct.

This word specifically being a noun and not an adjective, I thought it would be helpful to blacklist “forceful”.

Thanks for all you guys do!

@Mods

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It’s used as as adjective anyway in reality.

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Could you give an example of this?

I often encounter it in this combination: 勢いで and 勢いよくbut never as just 勢い I think.

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Gotcha. That’s the answer I was expecting/hoping for.

I think it’s fair to point out it gets used more frequently in these ways than as a subject or object, but to say the actual noun itself is used as an adjective is a little misleading given the context of the OP (especially so because your examples would be adverbs anyway, not adjectives).

@spaceman0x I agree that forceful should be blacklisted! Very easy to mix up those kinds of things.

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In a grammatical sense you are right, in terms of practicability for me it’s enough to know it is used as forceful.

Added to blocklist.

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I kinda like WK being a bit strict with grammar for vocabulary terms.

I think it’s fine to be quite a bit laxer with meanings for kanji, but I want it to be pretty strict with vocabulary.

I’m definitely more lenient with myself adding user synonyms with kanji. In my opinion, answering kanji meanings with the rough meaning suffices, (almost) no matter the grammatical form. It’s enough to know the gist of what a character offers to various 熟語 combinations or on its own (and be able to tell if it’s 当て字 or just some other weird meaning you should probably look up!).

There are enough weirdnesses with things that can be used multiple ways already (it’s a floor wax and a desert topping!). I’d like to know I’m memorizing the correct sense of the word whenever possible.

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Ok, I’m convinced.

In the end I am the person who thought 意地悪 is a verb and conjugated it without hesitation :rofl:

Sometimes I got the impression though that Wanikani is not consistent on when to use a noun and where not as an answer especially in Kanju meanings. It could be (and most probably is) my bad English, but in a case like the OT I am tempted to write something like “forcefulness”. Anyway, since this is not a problem native English speakers would encounter often I am totally happy to have it put on the blacklist.

But! Why do you say “power outage” and not “blackout”? Not expecting an answer, actually I gave up on passing Wanikani without cheating on level 47, otherwise I would spend the rest of my life trying to understand why it is a “go parlor” but not a “dance parlor” which sounds more fancy to me. At some point I was even fixed on “laundry parlor”.

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I know you weren’t expecting an answer, but “power outage” is a problem with the distribution, like you and your neighbors lost power because a transformer blew. “Blackout” is when there’s an issue at the power plant and entire swathes of cities are down.

There’s also a “brownout” where power is on but not stable.

At least IME. :wink:

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That’s funny. I’m a native English speaker but I also thought 意地悪 was a verb until I saw it here.

I’m not sure if you’re asking about English or about 停電 in Japanese. Either way, in English we would sometimes call a power outage a “blackout”. I think “blackout” is a reasonable user synonym for 停電 for sure. “Blackout” does connote the sense of lights going out specifically and doesn’t necessarily refer to a power outage, though: “a wartime blackout” refers to explicitly turning lights off in an area.

You’ve got me with “hall” vs. “parlor” though. Language is weird.

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I assumed the former. Oops. ごめん

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Wow, thank you! That makes a lot of sense. So the blackout is the more serious issue… I was confused because in German we say “blackout” to a power outage but it is true that in this case something more fundamental is going on than a normal “Stromausfall” which could have a cause in the house itself.

I have no idea if in Japanese there is a differentiation between different reasons or power outages.

Interesting, I never heard that.

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Yeah, my perspective is mostly American so keep that in mind, but that’s the main distinction I hear.

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It is often embarrassing to use English words used in German in an English conversation, like using English randomly katakanized in a Japanese conversation…

It must be strange for you to hear how other languages adapt and misuse English :joy:

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I actually enjoy it. It’s fun to see how the language morphs.

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For the first ten years of my marriage (Japanese wife) every time I’d ask how to say something in Japanese, the answer would invariably be katakana-go. After ten years I stopped asking!

99% of the time it would be an English word. The odd German or Portuguese word threw me occasionally, though. (Arbeit being the most obvious example).

I’m sure we’ve a few comically misused German words in American English.

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It isn’t? Do you count する forms? How did you conjugate it?

It appears that 意地悪をする is listed, and スル isn’t listed on 大辞泉, but there is 意地悪されている in an example sentence.

I have also found 意地悪したこと in Yourei.

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I’m not an expert in grammar terms so forgive me if I’m wrong but wouldn’t that be adverbial and not adjectival? 勢いで also doesn’t actually mean forceful really most of the time I feel like. Its more like momentum + で

Hmm, this seemed a bit weird so I checked and doing a quick search it looks like I’ve seen it as just 勢い a couple hundred times just in things I’ve read which comes out to a few times per book on average.

Heres a couple examples

風は、微風から、次第に勢いを増し、強風に近いものになった。

いもむしちゃんの文面からは愛嬌と勢いが滲み出ている

原作そっくりの絵柄で一コマ一コマ丁寧に描かれているのはいいが、コマ割りが不自然で読みづらく、キャラクターの動きにも勢いが感じられない。

言いたいことを勢いに任せて吐き出す無鉄砲さも、作家には必要なんじゃないか

I can’t say I’ve ever really thought of 勢い as forceful in any form really. I think “forceful” is related to the meaning, but misses the mark of the true essence of 勢い. I’m not sure if theres some english dictionary out there with that translation of it, but I don’t think it does justice to the real meaning personally and would suggest a monolingual one.

■一■ (名)
(1)運動によって生じる他を圧するような力。「火の―」「―あまって川に落ちる」「―よく走る」
(2)元気。威勢。「その―で行け」「―がつく」
(3)権力。勢力。「政界で―をもつ」
(4)はずみ。なりゆき。「緒戦に勝った―で勝ち進む」「―のおもむくところ」
■二■ (副)
物事の進行や運動の力によって当然そうなるさま。自然の結果として。なりゆき上。はずみで。「みんなが賛成したので,―そうせざるをえなかった」

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