Time in the mind's eye in Japanese

Japanese Language Questions
#21

I haven’t really seen it used, yet, but I’d imagine that the translation of “beyond this point” is the feeling it’s meant to invoke, rather than a direct translation.

When I see that wording in a context such as presented, I think of it as “that which lies before you” in the more external sense. These two ideas, one of “beyond this point” and another of “that which lies before you” are interconnected in my mind, though, and so have a similar feeling to me.

That’s just a guess, though, since I haven’t really come across it in context.

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#22

hi guys, bad english ahead… um i have noticed something in your examples. a pattern… a lightbulb moment for me but irdk if this is correct lololz i cant explain it any better so i hope u can understand xD and maybe if someone can understand, can u help me word this better? xD if this is all wrong please go ahead delete this :slight_smile:

  1. 先 as ahead, previous – the 先 is in the left side of the compound word – im thinking of “experienced”. also something that is ahead of you but not necessarily right physically in front of you… im so bad with organizing my thoughts im so sorry
  1. 先 as future – the 先 in the right side – im thinking of “future” “forward” “beyond this point”

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uhhh thats all xD oh god i think this is all wrong >< im gonna post this anyway pls delete if wrong :3

#23

Interesting idea but if you take a look at other words that use 先 you will notice that this is just a coincidence. :v:

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#24

But…先週 (ten characters)

#25

Hi syphus-san… sorry i didnt get what ypu mean by ten characters? :slight_smile:

I checked 先週 its read せんしゅう meaning last week…

#26

Not syphus, but I can tell you that wanikani forums forces you to have at least 10 characters in your reply, so to lengthen his reply to meet that criteria he typed out ten characters.

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#27

Yea, like the other post said, ten characters is the minimum amount of characters you need for a post, but I didn’t want to keep typing examples. Basically 先+amount of time is “last whatever amount of time”. And to make things fun 今度 on the other hand, can mean both “this time” and “next time.”

#28

But wouldn’t words like 先週 support the idea that the kanji when used on the left expresses ahead, previous? It’s the previous week. :thinking:

#29

Last week is the most recent week that was experienced… :wink:

By the way, there are a lot of semantic categories divided differently among languages. It’s better to try to get the feel or sense of what something refers to within it’s own context, rather than try to fit a square peg into a round hole when dealing with semantic variation in a foreign language.

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#30

Only if you want to do a lot of mental gymnastics to make opposite meanings fit.

But if you’d like the opposite, 祖先 means ancestor. So I think we can say that is unambiguously the past. And of course words with さき like 口先 and 連絡先 which don’t really fit at all. And 先々 which may break the universe.