I got asked to say "say" in Japanese

Japanese Language
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I have never been more confused in my life. [でもいいです]

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You don’t say.

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It’s literally

Sayと言ってください

To an English-speaker it looks like “say “this stuff in japanese””, but it’s the other way around.

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The answer is

言る

So, in total, there were two ways to say “Say” in Japanese, and this creates the medley.

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But isn’t “to say” 言(い)う? :thinking:

Please correct me if I’m wrong :sweat_smile:

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Did you mean 語(かた)る？
Or did you mean 言(い)う？

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My apologies! I do not know about which verbs should have る attached to them yet, as I have also not studied well the verb conjugations, nor do I know much of what that means.

However, I was amazed at how “say” could be "say"ed in many different ways. Could this be due to Japanese’s lack of “be”?

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Not sure, but yes, there are quite a few words that refer to talking: 言(い)う, 語(かた)る, 話(はな)す are ones I can think of right now, for example, and I’m pretty sure that there are even more :thinking:

However, I believe that there are so many words for one word because many of them vary in their nuance.

I might be wrong on this tho, but since I can already see @leebo, we’ll see if I’m right :sweat_smile:

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Sometimes things align well between languages, and sometimes there are mismatches.

Japanese has a bunch of different verbs for “wear” because they organize things by different areas of the body or different categories of clothing.

Japanese uses one verb, 見る, for “look,” “see,” and “watch” in English.

Also worth keeping in mind that English has many verbs for talking as well, so it may be that you’re just not thinking of the English verbs in a similar way since you know them so well.

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Rather than thinking of る as part of the verb conjugation, I would suggest thinking of it as simply part of the way the verb is spelled. All Japanese verbs in dictionary form end in an ‘u’ sound, but the last syllable can be almost any of the u ones: かう かく たす たつ しぬ よむ しる およぐ よぶ are all verbs, for instance. Verbs ending in る are quite common but there’s nothing special about the る in particular.

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Fun fact! 死ぬ is the only ～ぬ verb remaining in modern Japanese.

I mean, there’s also 往ぬ which is Kansai dialect but quite archaic otherwise, and 氏ぬ which is an internet slang version of 死ぬ, but that’s it.

Poor ぬ. It barely ever gets used.

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Really? There are no other ぬ -verbs other than 死(し)ぬ today?

Poor noodles :frowning:

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You don and a doff a hat, I imagine there will be some archaic verbs for other articles of clothing too

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