Reading a book this morning it struck me that there are some unique quirks in reading Japanese compared to - say - Spanish (for a native English speaker).
Obviously the kanji mainly makes it more difficult in that you can know a word - one I just came across - 辛い. I knew one reading - からい but the meaning didn’t fit. Although I knew the word つらい I didn’t know it shared the same kanji. So was lost until I looked it up.
Many languages have incorporated English words into the vocabulary. Japanese has loads but they have been twisted sufficiently that I often struggle working out what they are. レジャーシ-ト one that just caught me out. Couldn’t work out that it was supposed to be “leisure sheet” and that that meant something you sit on in the park.
Sometimes it does work in the other direction though in that there are words I can work out the meaning without knowing how to pronounce eg 敷く。I knew it meant to spread but didn’t know how to read it.
I think the quirks make reading Japanese interesting and frustrating in equal measures.
Totally this. When I started learning and could read Katakana, my brain would still give up on English-derived words, because they sounded so off. I still can’t deal with アルバム. Why is it not アルブム? Phonetically it makes more sense.
But there are others like アルバイト from German, which I’m somehow okay with :p.
That tracks with other dictionaries, yeah. Jisho (EMDict) is obviously not authoritative, but the way you had worded it sounded like they were not overlapping at all.
My understanding though is that てにいる is not used almost at all anymore. I imagine you might see it in older written works or something.
And while reading it as てにはいれる (potential of はいる) superficially seems possible, rules against using potential with inanimate subjects (usually you would not use this verb with something animate being “gotten”) eliminate it as a possibility.
I think that is a good explanation in that case, but then I come across something like “button” = ボタン. What? In which accent of English is the “u” in “button” closer to /o/ than it is to /a/? バタン would make much more sense to me.
So the word was imported much earlier? That might make some sense, especially since the final ン would probably match the Portuguese nasalised vowel, too.
