勉強 = study = force sb to do sth
I find it really funny that the word for study in Japanese 勉強します（ べんきょうします) uses two characters that in Chinese (mian3 qiang3) mean "force somebody to do something," "to do with great difficulty," or "reluctantly, grudgingly." Chinese has several words for study, among them 讀書 (du2 shu1, literally "read book") and 念書 (nian4 shu1, read/study book).
Why does Japanese use these two characters?
Are the Chinese words for study as used today a result of a recent language reform?
Why does Japanese use these two characters?
Are the Chinese words for study as used today a result of a recent language reform?
posted by pickle at 12:09 AM
5 Comments:
勉強 is one of 漢語（かんご）which originated from Chinese. Originally, it meant "make effort to do something difficult." In the Meiji Era, 勉強 came to mean "to study". It's said that studying is hard and it's something you have to do really hard and that acquiring knowledge with effort was considered a virtue. By the way, 勉強する may mean "to give a discount" in slang.
はじめまして。TAのますやです。
I found your posting interesting. Although Chinese and Japanese share many charactors, it's so interesting to know we use different characters for various things.
I agree with Fukai sensei that 勉強 means "make effort to do something difficult". I don't think 勉強 has meaning of "force somebody to do something" in Japanese.
I'd love to know more about the characters that have the same issue as 勉強.
That's very interesting. My kanji skills = 0 right now, but its always nice to learn something new thats outside of my scope of awareness.
リーさん、こんばんわ。わたしも、リーさんとはなすことがすきだったよ。リーさんわ、コロンビアでなにをべんきょうしている？わたし、すがく べんきょうしている。とても、おもしろい。じゃ、またこんどはなしましょう。
This is Heidi! I just made my blog, bleh. I'm really bad at website stuff.
In Korean, the characters we use for study are 工夫 (kongbu). And I don't know why. So "to study" would be "kongbu-hada" which linguistically is equivalent to "benkyou-suru." I'm assuming, haha. But in this class I get confused by all the Japanese sound units that sound like discrete words in Korean. It's probably causing me the greatest amount of confusion. But, I love kanji, because then I can at least figure out conceptually what I'm reading about, ha! Oh, I also can't hear the difference between "te" and "de" for some reason.
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