It would maybe have an equivalent in English (in certain circles) of using “hell of” as an adjective - maybe that’s just California slang, but lots of people used to use the expression as in, “That’s hell of cheap,” which of course, is so off-the-charts grammatically incorrect that it verges on absurdity.īut I simply did not hear “totemo” used a lot in Ōsaka, where I pretty much learned Japanese from scratch, with no school, classes or computers (this was before the Internet). In other words, I’d hear “sugoi yasui” instead of “sugoku yasui” a LOT - and since that’s grammatically not correct, I would ask my friends why they didn’t use “sugoku” instead of “sugoi.” I mean, technically speaking, it’s just plain wrong. So, I suppose I learned Japanese by “negative usage” - meaning, that if I didn’t actually hear an expression used very much by the people around me, I would tend not to use it myself, and the same with the opposite - if I heard an expression a lot, I would tend to use that instead of the “book-learning” equivalent.Īs an example, I was very puzzled when Japanese people used “sugoi” as an adjective but didn’t change it to “sugoku,” which would be the “proper” way to say it. I guess that’s analogous to learning how to play an instrument by practicing alone to records and then actually putting the practice into action by playing in bands, as opposed to going to music school and learning to read. I’ve never had a problem with “totemo” - if you want an analogy, I learned to speak Japanese purely by actually listening and speaking, as opposed to hitting the books or taking classes. Hey, that’s my life story in two sentences! Currently I teach Japanese here in Montreal. I lived and worked in Ōsaka for five years back in the early 90s. Totemo and kanari are always written using just plain old hiragana so if you’ve got kanji-phobia like many learners do, you don’t have to be afraid of these words.īut if you’ve got a kanji fetish (like me), or if you’re poring over some Edo-period literature, or if you’re going to be appearing on a Japanese kanji quiz show, you might be interested to know that totemo can be written as “迚も” and kanari as “可也.” ![]() Your Nagoyan friends will love love you for it. …try out saying totemo in the local dialect, it’s “でら” ( dera). I’m not going to get into detailed explanations for them though as this simple blog post has gone on long enough already. I wrote this article primarily with beginner to intermediate Japanese learners in mind, but if you’re looking for even more options or if you’re just an ambitious learner, here are some more words that you can jot down and try using instead of totemo.
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