Hello there!
A little thing I wanna ask if you don’t mind…
I have a problem with 前 and 後. Okay, one means front and the other behind. I get it… But I don’t get why 前 means also before. What is in front of me is the future, not the past, right? And 後 is supposed to be behind, how come it’s also after? There’s a logic there I don’t get… Do you have an explanation or is it just something I have to memorize?
When used to talk about time, it’s more about what comes first on the timeline from an outsider’s perspective. Imagine the events are queued up in a line and you’re the cashier serving them. Whichever one’s at the front (前) gets served before the others.
I think it is pretty interesting the way Japanese use the words 前 and 後 and it tells us a lot of the perception of time they have and how different it is from our western perspective.
Thank you for the cashier’s perspective! Before reading your solution, I was struggling to understand how it works. I mean, when using a.m. and p.m., I imagine myself at “noon” with a.m. behind me and p.m. ahead of me. But, when I came across certain program that uses same characters for “back” and “next”, it was backward (at least to me at first) so I was really confused! Putting myself outside of the timeline and looking at past as a starting point. A.M. gets served first before P.M. That helps me a lot (finally!)