How do you know which ‘girl’ to use when speaking Japanese? For instance, there’s 女、女子、女の子、女の人、少女… Obviously, 女の子 is referring more to a child, but how do you choose which of the other options to use when talking generally about a girl or woman?

[image] The final 女の子 / 女子 / 少女 / and all words for "girls" thread Japanese Language My goal is to make this the definitive thread to link to when the question comes up. Suggestions for more words are welcome. Examples of usages or phrases are in the summaries. There are …

In English, how do you know which word to use? Girl, young lady, lady, gal, lass, woman, dame, broad… All sorts of synonyms for all sorts of words. There’s nuance, there’s formal / casual / slang, there’s modern or old, etc. Aside from this specific case it’s generally good practice to consume nat…

I’m far from an expert on this since I hardly use these words, so I hope someone else comes along and gives you a better answer. I’m gonna be answering this based on my experience as a Chinese speaker and based on what I’ve seen in Japanese so far. Very frankly, you’ll have to learn from context an…

[image] Jonapedia: This is the one where I don’t agree with the thread that @seanblue shared above, because I don’t understand how it, ‘when referring to individuals, covers a similar age range to 女の子’. What about it do you disagree with? The idea is that if you’re talking about a person, lik…

Since I learned through listening and speaking first, I might be biased with this advice but I would say try to listen to some natural speech to help you pick up on the nuances. In general, just learning a written definition can be misleading and make it difficult to know exactly how to use it. Ther…

This is a pretty good baseline breakdown and I should have read it before writing my long-winded reply. :innocent:

[image] Leebo: As an aside, it’s easier to respond to a response to something I wrote if you tag me :slight_smile: Will take note. Thanks for the response. So uh… When I read the 婦人 definition in my dictionary (大辞林) for 女子, I assumed that it would apply to individuals as well. There were no …

Which "girl"?

Japanese Language

seanblue May 24, 2020, 8:48pm 2

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Which "girl"?

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