Hello fellow beings!
I want to apologise from the beginning because I am sure that some (if not all) of my questions might have been already answered before! But I am at work now, without Japanese language on this keyboard (copy paste ftw) and it is pretty late (2:00 am), so please bear with me.
Anyhow! Let me begin…
First of all, I present to you 日, 月 as an example to my question. As we all know, they have different readings and we gradually learn all of them. So, is there any way to know when each reading is used? I mean is there any reason behind the use of じつ instead of にち ? For example 毎日 is read as まいにち. Why? Or should I know the answer already?
Second Random Question!
A few seconds ago I learned the word 東北 and as we know it means northeast. Since we call “north” first, if we write it as 北東, will it be wrong?
Thank you so much for wasting your time for me! Now I am going to get back to work! I still have to finish a game in Civ 5 I left unfinished last week!
出血大サービス is idiomatic, but it’s not that difficult to imagine the connection.
When a company is losing money on something, that’s referred to as being “in the red.” Even in Japanese. see: 赤字
As for your other questions, I would just say that it’s important to remember that from a Japanese person’s perspective, there are words and those words are then written with kanji. Even if the reason the word exists in its current form is thanks to specific events in history that they are unaware of, relating to the exact time and process these were borrowed from Chinese.
Some things exhibit patterns that can be sussed out, such as がつ being used for 月 when it’s a specific month, and げつ when it’s a relative month.
But in general, you’re better off just accepting that the word is the way it is and that’s just how it is. Why do we say Monday instead of Lunday when both of those potential elements are derived from things meaning “moon”? Well, there are historical reasons, but an English speaker is just going to look perplexed if you say Lunday, so there’s just nothing you can do about it except remember the way it is.
Hmm, now that you said that, it makes sense. It just seemed so absurd when I first saw it!
Well, that’s what I do from the beginning and what I will keep doing, no complaints there. I just thought/hoped if there was any way, like a pattern as you said, that I could learn that would make any sense, or at least a little easier remembering these things.
I guess I just mean that there are reasons for why certain readings are used, but often they are not going to be particularly helpful to you. Does it help to know that the reason one word uses a particular reading and another uses a different one is because one was borrowed in the year 600 and the other was borrowed in 1100? That’s the kind of actual reason for most of the differences you will find.
I’m wary of too much pattern seeking for some things (take the 人, じん/にん topics for example) where the rules people invent require lots of bending over backwards.
Oh yeah, I am not trying to invent any pattern out of nothing, that’s for sure. I think that would make my learning process worse than it would meant to.
No. Actually, I’m about 95% sure that 北東 is more typical, and 東北 is archaic (taught by WaniKani only because it’s the name of the region in Japan that comprises the north-east bits of Honshuu). I did the Google-search-results-count test on 南東／東南 (because it’s a bit tricky to do it for 東北 since it is the name of a region), and got 12.5 million results for 南東 and only 3.8 million for 東南, so yeah, I’d go with 南東. Or 北東 or whatever.
As an added bonus, Wikipedia exclusively uses (north/south)-(east/west) order for the terms, same as English.
I before E except after C, except when the vowel sound is “ei”, or when Saturn is in the Fifth House.
It’s an arbitrary rule that requires bending over backwards to make it work - I before E except after C is a handy rule of thumb in English for spelling words like “believe” or “ceiling”, except that more words break that rule than follow it. Like “weird” or “caffeine” or “science” or “sufficient”, so some people like to tack on “or when sounding like A, as in neighbor or weigh”, but even that doesn’t catch everything.
Ohhhh ok then! I didn’t know that. English is not my native language and I don’t know these kind of rules and although I know how to properly write all the words you just said, it is because of experience - just like the way I learn Japanese or any foreign language it seems.
So, this is always the case for 月?
I keep getting it wrong in my recent reviews. It would make things much better for me, since I am very bad at learning things by heart.
