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

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2

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

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3

simple answer? languages are hard.

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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

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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”)…

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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”.

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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?

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8

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

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9

English used to have that word?!

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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)

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11

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

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12

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

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13

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

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14

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

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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’)…

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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.)

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17

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

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18

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

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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

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This is tripping me up so much rn ahaha

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