I recently saw this message sent by a non-native speaker, and I’m wondering if it’s correct/what it means. I couldn’t find an entry for “じゃはい” on Jisho so I’m assuming it’s “じゃ” and “はい” put together (but that doesn’t seem right to me either). Can someone please explain it to me?
(Also, this is my first time creating a topic so sorry if I made any formatting mistake)
Think it’s most likely じゃない with a typo.
Wouldn’t it be more grammatical to say, “元気じゃない。”?
Since you said this was posted by a non native… I wouldn’t try to understand it. It doesn’t have a special meaning from what I can tell.
Genki is clearly trying to talk about good, healthiness. じゃあ、はい、元気。Would be like, “um… yes… i’m good.”
Possibly, but without further context, I couldn’t say.
Agreed. You aways need context with Japanese.
Like your saying.
The could have asked.
Are you sick?
じゃない。元気。
Well, it could, for example, be talking about the textbook Genki. Then it could be, say, 簡単じゃない元気は (something, something).
But yeah, I’m loathe to make guesses. Maybe it’s completely wrong, like the guy’s trying to say “I’m not well” but has just smooshed the English sentence word-for-word into Japanese. Context.
Exactly. Even between us we’ve come up with five options that it could have been.
Can you share the complete message, and maybe the message before and after it? The more context you can give, the better!
The message before was 今日は元気ですか and then the person replied じゃはい元気だよ。
Maybe they did a typo and forgot to properly erase the じゃ part. It would be more readable with a comma behind はい as well.
I think you’re right. Their message actually makes a lot more sense if I look at it that way. Thank you (and everyone else who tried to help) so much!