The quick or short Language Questions Thread (not grammar)

Japanese Language Questions
#3075

Iki wo tsuku is what I wrote initially wheere its more like taking a breather rather than focusing physically on taking a breath. I don’t think it’s ambiguous really and when it’s people letting out a breath/exhaling I would say to read it as haku.

EDIT: oh wow I just realized I completely deleted what I said earlier. I think you have it backwards and when they want you to read it as tsuku there will be furigana or just no kanji more likely tbh rather than the other way around. Although I’ll tell you, the only time I have ever seen it as tsuku it never had kanji to begin with and it’s always like 息をつく暇がない. Googling it seems to be in agreement that tsuku is mental nuance and haku is physical lung nuance

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#3076

Perhaps this is just the consequence of how I study. I learned 息を吐く as a set, and if you search dictionaries for the string 息を吐く you will get entries for いきをつく in my experience. And seeing as つく is a Kanken pre-1 reading for 吐く while はく is jouyou, I’ve just got it at the forefront of my mind right now. Such dictionaries will also include the physical meaning of just letting out a breath as well. Dictionaries will not tell you how often the physical breath meaning is used (that is to say, hardly ever apparently).

So, I suppose I failed to keep in mind that 息をつく was an expression that could co-exist with the “non-expression” / “just the words at face value” string of 息をはく. Essentially, there’s no reason for there to be dictionary entries for 息をはく because it’s just what the words mean with nothing more, and with both kanji being not particularly advanced as jouyou kanji, I haven’t encountered an いきをはく sentence in my kanji studies in a long time (if I ever did).

This is the kind of thing that shows up on Kanken pre-1 and is supposed to catch you out for thinking it’s はく where only つく is right. Or you will be presented with the reading of つく and have to write 吐く. However, obviously つく is not always right, and I lost sight of that.

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#3077

How would y’all translate スタイル here?

image
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I think it’s surely not talking about staying in shape while solo traveling. I want to assume that it means along the same lines as マイペース, but I’m not sure how to say that in a non awkward way in English.

#3078

My 5 cents to the topic:

All doctors and such I’ve met in Japan said 息を吸う and 息をはく when giving instructions for x-ray or stethoscope.

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#3079

I’m not an English native, but I would go with something along

Travel plans tailored to your own taste/style

Is “style” that awkward a choice for native speakers in this case?

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#3080

While I feel like that makes good sense, I don’t think that’s very true to the phrasing in the image. I guess while “style” is fine in English, I want to make sure the Japanese meaning is actually captured since it’s so often used to refer to physical appearance that dictionaries usually refer first to physique, then fashion.

#3081

The sense of “style” meaning “a particular way in which something is done, created, or performed” does exist in Japanese.

個人や集団などに固有の、考え方や行動のしかた。

Your post made it sound like you might be concerned it didn’t.

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#3082

I wasn’t sure if I was missing some nuance since it’s not the primary meaning.

#3083

@Leebo since I dont wanna keep derailing the other thread about this…the other day you asked

To which I replied

The reason I said I couldnt pinpoint it and “maybe” it was so and so reason was because I initially thought the この sounded weird with it and wrote out that as my reply, but then realized I couldnt come up with a reason why that would make any sense so I went with the next thing that came to mind.

Like I said yesterday when we were playing rocket league though, it still didn’t sound right to me, so I went ahead and showed the sentences to my coworker and asked her what she thought of how natural they sounded. Sure enough she said

この車内、なんだか暑いですね : 丁寧だけど言ってもおかしくない
この電車の中、なんだか暑いですね: 言わない

And when I asked if there was a reason she wouldnt say the second one, she said the この. Her reasoning was that it implies youre currently on the train saying it to a friend, which makes using 電車の中 weird. If you used その電車の中 with a past tense adjective to say that the train was hot after the fact, she said that would sound natural, but using この with it when youre actually in the train sounds wrong.

Why the hell that is the way it is, I don’t know, but apparently my intuition isn’t as wrong as I thought. Its obviously a sample size of 1 so no guarantee every japanese person will say the same thing, but at least I’m not alone.

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#3084

このスレ内、なんだかあついですね。

いや、違う、そのスレの中。

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#3085

それが知っているわよ

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#3086

couple of naive questions:

is there any reason you’d use この電車 over just 電車?

likewise is there any reason you’d use 電車の中は暑い over just 電車は暑い?

just seems a bit redundant…maybe that’s why it feels off?

#3087

Normally I’d expect people to just go あつっ！ anyway.

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#3088

Well, first let me make it very clear that the point wasn’t “how do you say ‘this train is hot’?”. The original point was just how 車内 and 電車の中 have basically the same meaning but they didn’t feel interchangeable to me in a specific situation.

If that were the case, I would legit just say 暑いな. In the thread, I also already said that if I was gonna say anything, I would just use 電車.

However

This is saying something completely different so you can’t even compare them. 電車は暑い is just saying “trains are hot”. Like I guess if you said 冬は電車が暑い thats chill, but if you are trying to say that the inside of the train you are currently in in hot you shouldnt say 電車は暑い

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#3089

Anyone know what the reading of 中 would be in this sentence? :high_touch:

全員が驚きと衝撃に目を見開く中、彼女が平然と肩をすくめた。

#3090

Since it’s just its own word and not a suffix, it’s なか. It’s like “amidst”. “Amidst everyone opening their eyes wide in shock”.

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#3091

What kind of use do circled katakana like ㋶ have? Is it just for aesthetics or emphasis or what?

#3092

As far as I know? They’re usually something like bullet points or numbers in a list. ‘Point 1 is this’, ‘question 3 is that’, ‘please refer to section A’ and so on. You can find such things in things like workbooks for Japanese school subjects. Just to provide you with another example, Japanese laws have articles labelled using kana in the Iroha order, though I can’t say whether or not those kana are circled.

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#3093

Is there context for this, or were you just looking through the Unicode block? :slightly_smiling_face:

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#3094

Japanese love random stuff on unicode, really.
I mean, who needs circled numbers up to ㊿? Lol

Yet they use it all the time in articles, presentations and such.

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