Hello WaniKanians…
Or durtles…
Or please teach me how to appropriately call you all here,
I hope things are going well in your study, life, and work so far.
While doing reviews, I have a few small questions piling up on the back of my mind, which are all about the nuances between vocabs with the same meanings.
If they are already answered somewhere on this forum, my sincere apologies for repeating them here. In such cases, please kindly simply put the links here, I very much appreciate your help and will study them all!
What are the nuances between:
方言 (ほうげん) and 言葉 (ことば)？
歩 (ほ) and 行 (こう or ぎょう)？
他の人 (ほかのひと) and 他人 (たにん)？
十分 (じゅうぶん) and 足りる (たりる)？
不足 (ふそく) and 足りない (たりない)？
早く (はやく) and 早い (はやい)？
I almost asked this but have Kanae Nakamine to thank for this article about the nuances between 思う (おもう) and 考える (かんがえる): Differences Between 思う and 考える: The Japanese Words for "Think". Though I never see you in real life, you helped me a ton! My deep appreciation to you
言葉 is much more versatile and common. It’s often used to mean words or speech.
足りる is a verb, 十分 an adverb. You don’t use them the same way.
Pretty much the same thing, but also often a good rule of thumb is that if you have two words that have a similar meaning but one is jukugo (kanji compound read with the onyomi like 不足, usually borrowed from Chinese) and the other is kun (like 足りない), then there’s a good chance that the jukugo word will be more formal or technical.
It’s a bit similar to how, in English, Germanic vocab is often more casual while latin/French vocab is usually more literary or formal. Drink/beverage, freedom/liberty, brotherhood/fraternity, give up/abandon, begin/commence etc…
Overall I wouldn’t recommend memorizing all these nuances while doing WaniKani, focus on remembering the kanji. The rest will follow when you study grammar and start reading real Japanese.
他人 has more of a “stranger” connotation. 他の人 refers to “other people,” like when you’re talking about the other people in the room.
The item info of those two words does already touch on the difference:
他人 has a sense of unfamiliarity or distance, and suggests that the person isn’t well-known, or is different from you or a specific group of people. It doesn’t usually mean “another person” in the sense of an additional person, or another person distinct from the one you’re talking about.
This is more general than 他人, which you already learned. 他の人 can be anyone that’s not the speaker, or not the person being talked about. 他人, on the other hand, has an added implication that the person is someone unknown or unrelated.
方言 is “dialect”, i.e. a regional or otherwise limited variant of the language; in Japanese, kansaiben (spoken in the Kyoto/Osaka area) is the one you’re most likely to run into in books or manga or anime.
言葉 is a very common word with quite a broad sense. It can mean “language” and also “word” (e.g. この言葉の意味を教えて下さい。Can you teach me the meaning of this word?)
These are not words; they’re single kanji with their on-yomi readings. Don’t get too hung up on the “meaning” of kanji: they do not always have clearly defined single meanings, and they aren’t always used in words in a way that lines up with their meaning. What you want to be learning is the meaning and reading of words; consider the “meaning” and reading of individual kanji that WK teaches you to just be stepping stones to the vocab. But as other people have said, one is specifically walking, and the other more generally going and moving.
