って - explanation of usage

I’ve learnt that って is equivalent to と or also そうです. Is that the only use? Seems to crop up a lot in my manga and on TV programmes too (I mean in uses other than the て form itself).

Thank you…?

Edit: oh there was a question in there too.

Thanks. Seemed like it was appearing too often to be just the cases I had read about

Here’s a pretty thorough explanation (with examples) of the uses of って by Maggie Sensei if you’re interested, it’s the second part of the lesson ^^

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It has a ton of uses and using it in casual speech will sound very natural so its good to learn how and when to use it.

In general, to iu, to iu koto etc are extremely useful points to learn in Japanese.

って can be a contraction of a ton of quotation-related phrases, but the main ones are:

と (only the quotation marker)
という
とは
というのは

Check this page for more information.

If you don’t understand the difference between とは and というのは (or というものは / ということは), it’s that Xとは is setting up the term “X” itself as the topic, while Xというのは is setting up the actual thing that X refers to as the topic, or in other words you can basically just think of it as は by itself.

って can also be used casually in place of って言った・と言った. As an example of one I’ve seen a lot is 分かってるって which can mean something like “I told you I got it already!”. This could be used if someone is nagging you or something. Obviously there are other situations it could be used and mean something different, like almost everything about Japanese it’s very contextual.

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