2

I found a phrase that contains 昼間から but I am not sure if I understand the から function correctly:

またこの子は昼間からゴロゴロして

I believe that it should roughly translate to "This child is being lazy all day again".

But when I tried to understand all the parts of this sentence, I can't make anything else out of 昼間から other than "from daytime", and it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

What am I missing?

Edit: Is this meaning/use documented anywhere?

Improve this question
3
  • 1
    Related: japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/65295/…
    – user3856370
    Commented Feb 24, 2021 at 11:46
  • I stumbled across that same post, but since they are talking about 真っ昼間から as if it was an expression by itself with certain connotations, I am not sure if the same could be applied to 昼間から. Does it have the same connotations that could be translated as "from such a time as would normally be considered too early"?
    – Aridez
    Commented Feb 24, 2021 at 12:06
  • 「朝っぱらから 」に似てるよね。（この「ぱら」って何だろう‥？）
    – chocolate ♦
    Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 8:52

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

They assume that children should not start gaming, reading comics or doing other non-productive things like ゴロゴロする from the morning, noon or any time in the daytime.

[Edit]

After thinking for hours, I realized it's not right to translate から into 'from' here. The feeling or sense of から seems different than 'from'. It's interesting to know that "from the daytime" doesn't sound right in English.

から comes with anything like morning, noon, daytime, night, today, yesterday and so on. The thing is, you can say Xから even if it is time of X. So something like "from the daytime = in the daytime" happens in Japanese.

In your sentence, the kid started ゴロゴロする in the daytime AND the speaker is also saying that in the daytime. Also, yes, から can make connotations like "from such a time".

Other examples:

[朝から]{あさから}[勉強]{べんきょう}するの？

  1. [said in the morning] Are you going to study (start studying) now?
  2. Do you study (start studying) in the morning?
  3. Will you study (start studying) in the morning?

[朝]{あさ}に[勉強]{べんきょう}するの？

  1. Do you study in the morning?
  2. Will you study in the morning?
Improve this answer
14
  • But can 昼間 be interpreted as morning/noon? I haven't seen that definition anywhere
    – Aridez
    Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 8:41
  • Yes, because it has connotation as you said in the comment. I don't know if "from the daytime" or "in the daytime" is more natural and fitting here.
    – Satoshi
    Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 10:02
  • 3
    @Aridez I recommend you drop the English parallel because it’s perfectly natural in Japanese and not a slip. This 〜から accepts things that are strictly ranges (昼間、朝、早朝、etc). The implication is that you are doing(/starting) something earlier than expected. The opposite expression is also fine, eg （夜/夜中/etc)まで何してんの？, which implies you are doing something later (for longer) than expected — this also doesn’t have a syntactically identical parallel in English.
    – Darius Jahandarie
    Commented Feb 26, 2021 at 19:01
  • 2
    The thing is that any time range can be seen as a point if you zoom out far enough. 昨日からずっと仕事してる is fine, right? But 昨日 is technically referring to an entire 24 hour time range. But what is salient in the sentence is its interpretation as a “start point”. Same with 先週, 先月, etc. 昼間 also works fine, and its “start point” interpretation is “since it is bright out”. (Not “since the exact moment it became bright out (daybreak)”, but rather a more zoomed out interpretion when the precision doesn’t matter, just like 昨日から doesn’t mean from 00:00 yesterday)
    – Darius Jahandarie
    Commented Feb 27, 2021 at 9:50
  • 3
    BTW, even in English you can say “since the middle of the day” and it’s fine, even though you don’t mean exactly 12:00 or the entirety of some precise range like 10pm-3pm, but rather the implication is that precision is being omitted and everything is getting bucketed into “beginning, middle, end”. So this seems like a common phenomenon in natural language interpretation of time ranges, and I detect nothing unusual about the Japanese (except the earlier point about the 〜から in your question not exactly mapping to “since” due it being idiomatic, but that is unrelated to the time range issue)
    – Darius Jahandarie
    Commented Feb 27, 2021 at 9:59

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .