Why is 去年 last year and not 先年? Also, why is it 先日 and not 去日?

Japanese Language Kanji
1

If 去 means past and 先 means previous then previous (last) year should be 先年 and the other day (the past day) should be 去日

2

Why in English is it “last year” and “last week” but “yesterday”, not “last day” ? :slight_smile:

3

simple answer? languages are hard.

4

Yesteryear, yestermonth, and yesterweek are actual words though, albiet archaic.

At any rate, this comes up on jisho.org:
image

Probably used about as much as “yesteryear” if I had to guess. lol

5

There is also 昨年 (that I knew), and even 前年、旧年 and 客年 ( according to dictionaries when I searched for “last year”)…

6

Make them common again. Overmorrow, too. Japanese has the perfectly sensible word あさって, and here we are grinding out all the syllables of “the day after tomorrow”.

7

If I controlled the language, we would have “tomorrow” followed by “threemorrow”.

(Aren’t you glad that I don’t?)

Yeah, it has been a long and tiring day for me, why do you ask?

8

Well, I wasn’t going to use those exact words…

9

English used to have that word?!

10

Seriously. Learning about 明々後日しあさって, 五明後日ごあさって, etc. blew my mind.

Didn’t realize until just now that 明々後日 is an N2 word though. How about that.

Edit:

lol funny you say that (in regards to the above :rofl: the next one in line is literally 六明後日)

11

Was thinking the same thing. I need to start using yesteryear, yestermonth and yesterweek.

12

While you’re at it, might as well resurrect ‘fortnight’ too…

13

That one I do occasionally slip in, but then I knew that existed.

14

Fortnight isn’t dead. We use it all the time here in Australia.

15

Interesting - here in the US I’d say that it’s archaic, used mainly in a tongue-in-cheek fashion (such as when specifying a velocity in units of ‘furlongs per fortnight’)…

16

Fun fact: the speed of light is approxmately 1.8 megafurlongs per microfortnight. (Or terafurlongs per fortnight, but that’s not half as much fun to say.)

17

They really screwed up by not basing the SI units for distance and time on furlongs and fortnights, respectively.

18

It’s used in the UK all the time as well.

19

I was trying to think of a certain pair of words that I’ve complained about before way in the past and couldn’t remember until I did my reviews today:
近日 and 近年

in some days (soon)
vs
recent years

grumble grumble

20

This is tripping me up so much rn ahaha