Hope you’ll pardon me if this doesn’t completely fit, I think my question is some mix of etymology, WK, Japanese, and history so maybe not the best fit?
農民 is listed as meaning ‘peasant’ with an alternative meaning of ‘farmer’. And WK’s meaning aid is " The peoples who work in the farm are the farmers… the peasants."
I remember hearing in a video about the development of Tokyo that, at least in the Edo period, Farmers were not the bottom of the hierarchy, merchants were because they didn’t produce anything of value on their own. To me peasant is the bottom of the hierarchy.
How is it that the word for farmer, and important person in Japanese society it seemed, is also the word for peasant?
I’m not really sure if this is an answer to your question, because I’m just googling it quickly before dinner, but it seems like 農民 is mostly used to refer to the concept generally worldwide, and the Wikipedia article barely mentions Japan.
Also, I’m not sure even the word “peasant” requires that it be the absolute bottom of the hierarchy. It’s a lowly position, but the specifics aren’t going to be the same everywhere I imagine.
I don’t know shit about history, but 百姓 seemed to be pretty far below the samurai in the first place despite being just “one step below” them. In addition, a quick look up says
実際には、百姓は重い年貢に悩まされ、町人よりも厳しい生活を送っている人がほとんどでした。
一方、町人のなかには税が免除され、贅沢な暮らしをしている商人などもいました。
百姓の下に町人を位置づけ、身分を上げることで、百姓たちの厳しい生活に対する不満をそらす目的があったと考えられています。
江戸時代の身分は、士農工商に分かれていたということを覚えておきましょう。
So it kinda seems like a situation where their “higher status” really didn’t mean much and they actually did have it pretty rough. So even in japan back in the period you mention, it doesn’t seem like they were all that special. Take 農民 then which extends to modern day and is used for every other countries history as well and it seems pretty reasonable that peasant would be a definition for it.
That’s true, I suppose it’s more of my understanding of the word getting in the way.
Oh definitely not living a life of any sort of luxury I just thought it was interesting that they were thought of more highly because they were farmers. I’m used to farmers (not the big framers) being looked down on a lot and merchants being portrayed as more upper class so I was surprised.
Does make sense, especially in modern day though that the word would fit. It looks like there are other terms specifically for farmer as well so that clears that up a bit.
I’m not sure if you read the japanese I posted, but it definitely gives the vibes that they weren’t actually thought of more highly. Heavy taxes, harder lifestyle, and formality of higher status in name just as a consolation prize makes it sound like lower status in actuality but they want to avoid some massive problems from having the largest class (by a huge majority) get pissed off at their lifestyle so they tell them they’re important to keep em in line.
Just one persons take on it, but thats what their take on it kinda seemed like to me.
Couldn’t read it and didn’t think to pop it in a translator at the time so thanks for pointing it out again. That sounds pretty plausible yeah. Like the modern day’s “clap for nurses”. Farmers are important, their lives are hard but we don’t actually want to do anything for them so lets bump them up in the caste system but leave them where they are.
More things change the more they stay the same I guess. Thanks again!
that a pretty good comparison. I know nothing about japanese history so I can’t say how valid the claims are but that definitely seems like what they were getting at
I think you’re applying too much of the nuances of the English word to the Japanese here. It happens that in western European society the poor rural population who mostly engaged in subsistence farming were absolutely at the bottom of the social ladder, and so our word for those people has taken on extra nuance about that social view of them. Japanese society didn’t have quite the same take on this, so the nuances don’t always apply. Sometimes “peasant” will be a good translation of 農民, and sometimes “farmer” or some other word will work better, depending on the context and whether the negative nuances of “peasant” seem to be getting in the way of a natural translation.
Separately from that, as @Vanilla says even if in theory the Confucian/Chinese inspired social order of samurai: peasant:artisan:merchant puts the peasants further up the ladder, in practice the economics had a massive practical effect: merchants could be very rich and that brought power and status of its own, some samurai were very poor and led correspondingly hard lives, and being a rural agricultural worker was a miserable and hard life right through to the end of world war two. (Mikiso Hane’s Peasants, Rebels, Women and Outcastes is good if you want a social history view of what life could be like for them.)
Wikipedia thinks that historians now see these four categories as more of a classification than a hierarchy: the samurai were above everybody else, and the other three groups were equal but different. The four class division ignores various cases like monks, noble families and outcastes also.
I guess I’ll keep pressing forward and immersion will make things more clear. Is it okay to use loan words in replacement of words I don’t know in Japanese in my internal monologue and stuff or should I try harder to remember?
I think the problem might be here. There are some overlaps between “farmer” and “peasant”, but “peasant” is not necessarily pejorative. It’s just a person who lives in a village and a “farmer” is someone who has a field or works in a field. On like, the most basic level.
It’s different when you insult someone by calling them a peasant, of course.
I guess my take on it is I think you’re thinking too much about it. What’s “ok” usually depends on what you’re trying to achieve in the first place, but in your case I’m getting vibes that your goal is already a little weird. Excuse me if I’m misinterpreting something:
When I think of deliberately practicing thinking in japanese, I’m thinking of kinda what I did where I wrote out god knows how much japanese as a stream of consciousness and would deep dive into every little concept I wanted to express that was tripping me up while having natives correct my japanese. All this coupled with extremely high levels of listening input and almost no english input made “thinking in japanese” my default state so long as I didn’t break my input stream or start speaking english for more than ~1 hour. It did wonders for rewiring my brain it felt like, but thats like an extremely late step in output IMO. If you are there, then I would be super happy to dive more into everything I did with you.
But what it sounds like is you are just starting to produce japanese? If thats the case, then I’m going to assume that what you mean is you want to be able to say thing X without thinking of the equivalent English Y first. If that the case, then I don’t think theres any deliberate practice that needs to be done. Like if you know the japanese well enough, it will just come out. Theres probably a handful of words you already can do this with (maybe along the lines of やった、まじで？、本当に？、はい、すごい、さすが、やだ） and its just a matter of expanding that category. Input will sort that out. Chances are you haven’t acquired the language, is all. I don’t think I’ve really had any words that I’ve felt confident I had acquired and used a couple times and couldn’t naturally conjure them up without the english coming first. The using it a couple times is part was important to move some stuff into my active vocabulary and is the biggest reason to practice output (in your head works, but I find typing or speaking preferable). If that’s something you want to tackle, then you definitely want to focus on those while you are outputting (including internal monologue) or think of a way to explain around it. If you can’t do that either or lack the knowledge completely in the first place then I think you’re too ahead of yourself and should just focus on improving comprehension.
TLDR: I can’t say for sure without knowing exactly where you’re at and what you’re trying to get out of this practice, but it seems like you’re overthinking it.
I swear the hardest part of learning Japanese for me may just be knowing English.
近所 = neighborhood
付近 = neighborhood
But 近所 is neighborhood as in the area around and associated with my house, or a specific house or location, right? Whereas 付近 is the neighborhood as in “in the neighborhood of 10000 people showed up” or “we should be in the neighborhood (vicinity) or the castle town”, right? Or something similar like that?
I’m not sure how people ever learn English when almost any word can mean almost any other word. My brain keeps wanting to say why does Japanese have so many words that mean the same thing but that’s backwards, all the Japanese words have a distinct meaning but English is such a mess they can all derive to the same word.
付近 is pretty much always the physical area around something, and I usually see it in relatively stiff contexts like newspaper articles (such as describing the area that will be hit by a storm) or warning signs on buses or in museums (like, “don’t stand in the area around the door”).
In that sense, 付近 can be used to describe the area around a house, but you probably wouldn’t just bust it out in conversation to talk about your neighbors, since 付近 is really just about physical proximity and not a more abstract sense. Talking about the houses near you would be 近所.
It would probably help to check monolingual dictionaries for definitions when you can’t tell a difference in English glosses.
Thanks for the detailed write up; I’ll give a more elaborate explanation of my situation.
I currently can produce Japanese fine without the need for saying the English word first provided I can remember what the Japanese word is. What’s tripping me up is that when I’m trying to communicate something, and I just don’t remember the word in Japanese, I don’t know whether I should just say the word in English if I think it’s an okay loan word, or just skip it. I’ve been doing input for quite a while (like a year and a half) but I just wasn’t getting into the habit of consistently thinking in Japanese. Sometimes I start thinking in Japanese and then suddenly end up thinking in English and don’t notice for a bit. Other times I just don’t know what to think about. So I’m trying to think in Japanese a lot more.
What I would personally do is use a loan word if you know it, and otherwise try to come up with some way to explain around it like you would in a real life situation. You could also just look for the word you’re trying to say.
I don’t feel too strongly either way, but that’s what I personally would do. My basic philosophy is that progress is made by overcoming tasks previous not possible for me, so using the easiest shortcut possible (English) to get around problems whenever you can’t think of the Japanese seems like a pretty big missed opportunity to me.
Are 女 and 男 not widely used? Because they were in Genki version 2 but they are not in the newest version of Genki. 男の人/女の人 and 女性/男性 are in the 3rd edition though.
I tried googling around for this, but due to overlap with other questions didn’t really find anything.
What is your recommendation for remembering to do the actual act of thinking in Japanese? I get distracted and then realize that I went back to English like twenty minutes prior.
Mmm I think this is a bit of a hard one. I think if you’re not yet in the habit, maybe thinking in English, but outputting in Japanese is a good start? Then using common phrases like と思う to end a sentence or 気に入った if you got to like something. Stuff like that.
For me personally reading a lot helps more than anything.