New answers tagged word-choice
1
「旅行者」 would probably be translated as "traveller". The takeaway here is that it has a concrete meaning, as in a person that is physically on a trip. This word might appear in the news.
「旅人」on the other hand is much more poetic. I would translate it as "wanderer". Actually, an even better translation might be "vagabond". This word would typically appear in a ...
23
The difference is rather huge.
「旅行者{りょこうしゃ}」 sounds neutral/bland, businesslike and matter-of-fact with virtually no nuance. It is like "tourist" in English, or somewhere between "tourist" and "traveler".
「旅人{たびびと}」 sounds poetic and a bit profound. It is more like a "pensive type of traveler" or "wayfarer" than a "tourist" or "average traveler".
For ...
3
The て form is used to connect two verbs when the actions are performed separately but in sequence, usually one after another. An example might be ごはんを食べて、家を出る. These are sometimes called verb concatenations - although it is a case of two verbs being connected, they are not strictly the same as what you asked about. What you are referring to is a compound ...
5
使われ始めて
Two points to note here:
1) The construction for "start to verb" is
masu-stem of verb + はじめる
e.g. 食べ始める、 読み始める etc. This is what is happening in your example. 使われ is the masu-stem of 使われる. Which brings me to point two.
2) The translation of 使われ始めて should be "start/started to be used" rather than "start/started to use". 使われる is the passive ...
3
If what you want to say by the word "hedonism" is:
living and behaving in ways that mean you get as much pleasure out of life as possible, according to the belief that the most important thing in life is to enjoy yourself
then you understand both words correctly. "Epicureanism" as an English word is a popularized metaphor which is often not even true to ...
1
In my opinion, it should be 下手で当然だろ？ (It's natural that I'm poor at it, isn't it?) , which can barely be interchangeable to 下手なはずだろ？, but not はずだよ.
Neither わけだ or はずだ are really correct because わけだ (No wonder that's that) can only work when you provide information the listener isn't aware of or when you hear the reason you haven't been aware of, and はずだ is ...
1
家内 literally translates to "in the house," so even Japanese people feel it's a bit old fashioned (a bit like something an old-fashioned boomer might say).
The most neutral term is probably 妻 which nuance-wise most directly translates to "wife" (vs husband), and you'd only use it to refer to your own wife. I'm Japanese American and I'd feel most natural ...
6
The differences are two-fold.
Scope of meanings:
「おもしろい」 (I do not use kanji to write this word.) has two different meanings. "Funny" and "interesting". Which one the word is being used for depends totally on the context/situation.
「興味深{きょうみぶか}い」 only means "interesting", "arousing one's curiosity", etc. It can never mean "funny".
Formality:
「おもしろい」...
-2
深い means deep.
興味深い sounds more profound than 面白い.
7
「繁盛{はんじょう}」 and 「隆盛{りゅうせい}」 "feel" quite differently from each other. The former is a household word even 10-year-old kids know how to use, but the latter is a much 'higher' word.
「繁盛」 is most often used to refer to the success/prosperity of a business. If a burger joint has plenty of customers, we would say 「あのハンバーガー屋{や}さんは繁盛している。」. You would sound ...
3
This depends on the topic and the type of what you are writing, so it's impossible to generalize. An article about programming or Disney characters will naturally contain a lot of katakana words, whereas you probably want to intentionally avoid katakana words when you are writing a samurai novel. You can see a statistical analysis based on a newspaper corpus ...
2
分 is used as "one tenth" in several context, e.g. in these meanings on jisho.org. So 十分 is ten tenths, or 100%, or enough. 十二分 is equivalent to twelve tenths, or 120%, or more than enough.
21
I hate to sound realistic here, but the concept of the female ninja is basically all fictional to begin with. If I am not mistaken (which I do not think I am), there exists no record so far that proves the existence of a female ninja in real life that performed the same tasks as a male ninja such as surveillance and destruction.
That being said, the word 「...
1
In your case, simple verbs like 語る and 話す should work because the poem is just a part of his story. Or you can avoid any verb corresponding to "tell" and say something like 彼の話は詩から始まりました. (詩で物語を始める is a little puzzling.)
You may not need them, but verbs commonly used with verse/poetry include:
語る (this can refer to dramatic storytelling like that of a ...
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