There seems to be an endless supply of Japanese words and phrases that translate to “somehow” or “anyhow” in English. It’s difficult, at least with J-E dictionaries, to understand the nuances of each variation. If you had to break these up into categories, how would you do it?
I see a lot you listed are used in very formal fashion, especially the upper ones (you don’t see this frequently in this form, I think). In manga, I see them being used by aristocrats or politicians.
I’m not a native English speaker, but I can consume all kinds of media with no problem at all.
Still, I never heard of “haphazard/ly”, “helter-skelter” or “willy-nilly”.
And I never heard “by hook or cook”.
Sooooo… I don’t feel bad about not having any idea about the Japanese versions
I wouldn’t class many of these as having the same or even really similar meaning.
This is not a good way to learn new words. Also try not to think about the words in terms of what they could be translated into English/whatever your native language is as. This complicates things more. Actually, these sorts of expressions are exactly the type that looking up a translated definition won’t help you with.
I don’t quite remember where I saw this, but: “There aren’t many words that mean the same thing, just many words that you don’t understand yet”.
If you did want to try and categorise these, I would recommend using a Japanese thesaurus like https://thesaurus.weblio.jp/ and seeing what comes out when you type each in. I wanna say again thought that I don’t think this is productive at least in terms of language learning
I can still list the helping verbs I learned in 3rd grade from memory for some reason:
Am, is, are, was, were
be, being, been
have, has, had
do, does, did
shall, will, should, would
may, might, must, can, could
It never actually did me any good in the 34 years since, but hey, cool party trick.
I wouldn’t call it rare so much as specific to a discipline, like linguistics. I wouldn’t expect anyone outside of network engineers or lawyers to know what an egress is.