The quick or short Language Questions Thread (not grammar)

What’s the difference between 受ける, もらう & 受け取る? I’ve seen a few English & Hi Native sources online, but I’m not so sure I can trust those…

HiNative usually has, you know, natives answering, so for something fairly basic like how these are used differently, they seem like perfectly reasonable sources of info.

Natives are not as good at explaining grammar unless they’ve been trained in it.

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I’m noticing more kanji without vocab now, quite disappointing. I try to look up words the kanji is used in but this one seems weird. How common is it?

How do I choose a day if I’m given two options by my teacher?" For example, if I’m replying to 今週木曜日か金曜日空いてる?and I want to choose Friday?

Depends how many people use it in their name. It’s listed as 人名用漢字 in Jisho.

There a few of those scattered around.

It’s also the kanji for かな, but I’ve never seen it used like that yet. It’s always written in kana.

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There is a nice list of the jinmeiyou kanji of WK and their use made by Belthazar here:

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Not sure if this the right threat. Those two kanji I circled. What are they? The pic is to blurry to zoom onto with an app.

You circled quite a bit more than two kanji. :sweat_smile:

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What, 避暑(ひしょ)? It means ‘the act of avoiding (summer) heat’. It often involves travelling to cooler places.

For the properties you circled on the left, I can’t really read them in Japanese, but I think they mean

種別 Species/type
狩猟数(捕獲数)Hunted number (captured number)

(OK, I ended up forcing myself to search/guess the readings so I could type them, so I’ll just put them here in the same order:
しゅべつ
しゅりょうすう(ほかくすう))

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Ughh my I did didn’t I…

Thank you sir!

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幸運 and 幸福… all I see is ‘happy luck’. I didn’t realize there were two until I was getting them wrong. Any advice?

運 is generally used to mean “luck”. So 幸運 you can think of directly as “good luck” or “good fortune”. For comparison, another word/phrase using 運 is 運がいい, which means “lucky”. In fact, a monolingual dictionary defines 幸運 partly as 運がよいこと.

福 is more like “blessing” than “luck”. 幸福 is a little harder to define in English, but maybe I’d say “blessed”. A monolingual dictionary defines it as being happy/content or something being fun/enjoyable without discontent. For comparison, another word using 福 is 祝福, which can be translated as “blessing”. It basically means celebrating or praying for 幸福.

Hope that helps!

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(The state of having) good luck (noun); lucky (adj)

The state of being happy/content about something, particularly life in general, possibly while feeling blessed/lucky (noun); happy, joyous, blissful (adj)

I’m extrapolating a bit from Chinese usage, but as far as I can tell from examples and definitions, these words are used similarly in both languages, though Japanese syntax is clearly different. You could think of 幸福 as a possible consequence of 幸運 if that helps you (i.e. as happiness/contentedness due to good fortune), though it’s not necessarily a result of luck alone, of course.

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Hi, it’s me again
As far as I know, in Japanese there are different words to describe age of people and objects. But what if I want to compare a person’s age and an object’s age? For example, how should I say “This thing is two years older than me”? I could always go descriptive, and say something along the lines of “It was made two years before I was born”, but is there more concise way?

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It’s probably best if someone else confirms this or offers other suggestions, but I think you’ll be understood if you say これは私より2歳年上だ。I think that at the very worst, you’ll be assumed to be personifying the object. I found a page on a Japanese real estate agency’s page that I don’t fully understand, but the title is「あなたの家は何歳ですか?」and it seems to discuss the differences in the insulating properties of houses depending on when they were built. If you can use 歳 for an inanimate object in that context, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to use it when comparing yourself to something else.

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Thanks, that’s interesting. I thought that 歳 could only be used for people.

I’m not certain, to be honest. I’d agree based on my experience with Chinese: 歳 feels like something that’s only meant to be used with living things. However, when I check the Wisdom Dictionary and the dictionary on Weblio’s EJJE page (here), I get annotations like this on certain definitions/translations:

b(動物植物などの年齢年数年代

That tells me that the use of these terms might be a little looser than I think.

At the end of the day though, here’s how I see it: it’s probably much more natural to use a circumlocution like what you suggested in your original post, and it’s true that things and people usually don’t have the same sort of ‘age’ in Chinese, and it’s probably the same in Japanese, because I very rarely hear translations of sentences like ‘this school is a hundred years old’ in terms of age. However, if you really wanted to phrase the thought the way you suggested it, then I don’t think the 〜歳年上 structure would be ‘wrong’. I need confirmation from usage examples or someone with more experience, but I think it could be understood as personification that would make sense in context. I don’t think personifying an inanimate object like that would be wrong in Chinese, though it might feel rather poetic, and so I don’t think it would be wrong in Japanese either, because I think both cultures have a tradition of giving inanimate objects a certain spirit, especially when they are seen as representative of a certain institution or set of ideals.

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It’s the first time I’ve noticed this, and it just so happened that I encountered it in two different manga today :joy::

image

What does it mean when there are those little circles next to each kana/kanji? Is it perhaps a way to emphasise the word…?
Dunno, just guessing :joy:

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yep! You guessed right!

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