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My sentence:

Most nights, when I'm asleep, I'll suddenly wake up and experience (an episode of) sleep paralysis. Seeing things that don't actually exist, and hearing voices, while your body is paralyzed is terrifying. Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis before?

My attempt:

ほとんどの夜、寝ている時にふと目覚めて金縛りを感じます。自分の体が麻痺しながら存在しないものを見えて声を聞こえるのは怖いですよ。金縛りを感じたことがありますか。

That's what I'm trying to say, but I couldn't figure out how to use 金縛り in a sentence, and I was unable to find any example sentences. Would it be better to say 「自分の体が麻痺する時」instead of「自分の体が麻痺しながら」or would there be a better way to express this?

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1 Answer 1

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Full Text: ほとんどの夜、寝ている時にふと目覚めて金縛りのように感じます。体が麻痺している間、存在しないものが見えて、声の幻聴が聞こえて、怖いですよ。金縛りになったことがありますか。

Sentence 1: ほとんどの夜、寝ている時にふと目覚めて、金縛りのように感じます。

Justification: I looked up some example sentences and it looks more common to use 金縛り either with あう (with this character meaning: 遭) or になる in the following manner: 「金縛りにあったように動けなくなる」「金縛りになっている」 「恐怖で金縛りにあった。」「体が金縛りにあったように、指一本動かせないことに気づいた」

Sentence 2: 体が麻痺している間、存在しないものが見えて、声の幻聴が聞こえて、怖いですよ。

  • The 3 forms ~ながら, ~間、 and ~間に all mean while/during, but they have different nuances to them. Here's you should be using ~間 imo. Read some of the explanations on this post.
  • It's incorrect here to say を見えて and を聞こえる。This has to do with what's called transitive and intransitive verbs. The short explanation that you say 雲を見る and 雲が見える. Similarly, say 音楽を聞くand 音楽が聞こえる。 -> Q: How can you look things like this up? A: I came across the following corpus which lets you see the usage frequency of various words with different particles and adjacent words. When you search 見える on this site, you can see that が見える is used 106,000 times (over 80% of the time), whereas を見える is only used around 3000 (2%). The differences in sentence types are clear too.
  • I think the 自分の is unnecessary here because it's already clear that the 体 refers to the body of whoever is feeling 金縛り in the first sentence.

Sentence 3: 金縛りになったことがありますか。

  • Same reasoning as sentence 1

Bonus resource: There's this website (英辞郎; it's free) I use because it's geared toward translation from native-sounding Japanese to native-sounding English. It's still super useful as an English speaker because I can type in idiomatic phrases or figurative expressions and get natural translations rather than the literal ones from Google or jisho.org. Ex. Searched "sucking up" and found "He's always sucking up to his boss" 「いつも上司にごまをすっています」. I end up using it sometimes when I'm writing

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    いつも上司にごまをしています --「ごまをすっています」ではなく「ごまをしています」って、英辞郎に載ってるんですか・・?
    – Chocolate
    May 27, 2021 at 13:04
  • You're absolutely right. I should've copy-pasted instead of typing it myself. May 27, 2021 at 16:26

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