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I have some misunderstandings about some words in Koichi’s Ultimate Nouns Deck and Ultimate Adjectives Deck.I know I have a hefty amount of clarifications here. Please try to clear up as many as you can. Much appreciated!
What does ____ mean?
浅い あさい
可笑しい おかしい
偉い えらい
深い ふかい （can it be used in a sentence like “That was deep.”?
伝 つて
関係 かんけい
方向 ほうこう
横 よこ
頃 ころ
生活 せいかつ
ほと （degree,limit?)
両手 りょうて （HANDS?)
生徒 せいと （EYE PUPIL OR STUDENT PUPIL?)
一番 いちばん
向かい むかい
以外 いがい
面 めん
How can くやしい be used as an adj. (it means regrettable right?)
まま （CONDITION?)
状況 じょうきょうDiscrepancies
うまい ｖｓ。 おいしい
おおい ｖｓ。 たくさん
かたい ｖｓ。 きつい ｖｓ。 くるしい ｖｓ。 たいへん ｖｓ。 むずかしい
あぶない ｖｓ。 きけん
すごい ｖｓ。 すてき ｖｓ。 すばらしい
だいじ ｖｓ。 たいせつ ｖｓ。 まじめ
ひくい ｖｓ。 みじかい
ふじ ｖｓ。 あんぜん
ほぞい ｖｓ。 せまい
ばき ｖｓ。 むち
おとなしい ｖｓ。 やさしい
らんぼう ｖｓ。 はげしい
うち ｖｓ。 なか
すがた ｖｓ。 かたち
とき ｖｓ。 じかん
ぜんぶ ｖｓ。 すべて
地 ｖｓ。 土
いま ｖｓ。 こんど
～才 ｖｓ。 歳
おに vs。 ま （DEMON?)
あいつ ｖｓ。 やっつ ｖｓ。 こいつ ｖｓ。 ぞいつ
おもい ｖｓ。 かんがえ
位置（いち） ｖｓ。 場合 ばあい
とびら ｖｓ。 もん
かず ｖｓ。 ごう
さき ｖｓ。 さっき
しょうねん ｖｓ。 おとこのこ
こちら ｖｓ。 こっち
せなか ｖｓ。 からた
いっしゅん ｖｓ。 しゅんかん
じょせい ｖｓ。 おんな
きふん ｖｓ。 かんじ ｖｓ。 かんじょう
つわもの ｖｓ。 きしThe best way I could recommend looking at this is to go to Jisho.org, get the jisho.org bookmarklet, then highlight the word as you’ve typed above, and then click the bookmarklet, it will then come up with a small window with the meanings.
For instance the first vs you have.
うまい ｖｓ。 おいしい
おいしい is
delicious; tasty; sweet
but うまい can mean
1: skillful; clever; expert; wise; successful;
2: delicious; appetizing; appetising;
3: fortunate; splendid; promisingI think also you should remember that The vocab is following the 80:20 rule. or 20: 80 rule, 20% of stuff is use 80% of the time, or whatever it was, so うまい is most often used to mean delicious. Other meanings are more obscure.
Also check out how many different ways to write it, I guess its probably written in kana alone most often, maybe the kana form is generally taken as delicious.
Also don’t forget that in English we have synonyms as well, thats how we know the theosaurus existed. Quite often there are more than one word we can use, although the differences can be subtle. Same in japanese. Some might make you sound snooty, some might be more polite than others. Make a note in your Japanese learning log about stuff like this so you can ask someone, maybe a Japanese person, or a Japanese teacher, or something, or some other Japanese learning place or make it into a journal entry and post on Lang-8, you’ll often get it corrected and learn some stuff about what you post.
http://www.alc.co.jp/ – bang them in the search box and hit enter. Lot’s of different example sentences given. Or you could check out the example sentences on jisho.org.
As for “what’s the difference between X and Y?”, a lot of these are things you just have to learn over time, things you just have to not worry about for now – you’ll get a feel for them. They’re things that, if you asked a Japanese person, they’d reply “Hmmm… I don’t really know; they just ARE different…” because it’s an instinctive difference rather than something clear cut. And some of them are actually obvious if you look them up in a dictionary. For example, in regards to “位置（いち） ｖｓ。 場合 ばあい”, 位置 is a place/position while 場合 is a case/situation – I’m not sure how you are confusing them, since in the dictionary they both have distinct entries, not similar at all as far as I can see.
There are a couple I can see where the difference might be harder to garner from a dictionary though: こっち is a casual/contracted form of こちら (sometimes if you see a word with a っ and it sounds like another word, it could be a contracted form; the more contracted forms you learn, the more you’ll see what I mean, and the more you’ll be able to get a feel for whether something might be another form of a different word). 歳 is the proper counter for age, while 才 is a substitute with less strokes which is easier to write.
Also, be careful with your diacritics (can’t remember the Japanese name) – you’ve written からた instead of からだ and ふじ instead of ぶじ. Just making sure you’re not reading/learning the words wrong in the first place :P There were a couple of other cases that I can’t remember now.
> jisho.org
I think that site’s “Kanji by Radicals” feature is useful, but the example sentences are unreliable.
> alc.co.jp
This one is really useful for tracking down idiomatic phrases, but sometimes you have to be a bit clever to do it. For individual words, it often returns too many pages of results, so it can be difficult to get a comprehensive idea of what a word means.
> dictionary.goo.ne.jp
I recommend using this one for looking up individual words. There are lots of different tabs, but if you want Japanese -> English, so use the 和英 tab. It gives you a nice overview of all of the meanings of a word, with little examples.
I have to agree, though, that some words are defined confusingly, say with some word that’s also a synonym, everywhere I look. 生徒 is a good example – it’s pupil as in a student. You’ll occasionally see the word “seitokai” pop up in anime, yes? A couple of anime series titles too. That’s 生徒会 – student association.
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