Re: [Lingo] verb-iru

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Niels Kobschaetzki writes:

 > You can't say まだ纔瘢韭絎竢躬？
 > Didn't know that (and it seems that the iPhone-sentence completion  
 > didn't either ;))

Nope.  As far as I know, you can't.  But then, in English you can't
say "I am not knowing ..." OR "I am knowing ..."!  It's kind of
strange to me that in Japanese it's 知っている for the positive, but 
知らない for the negative.

 > Sure a lot of people are translating [懐かしい as "nostalgic" or
 > "familiar"] but I think that it is not really the same. I've never
 > heard someone saying "aah, nostalgic" or "that's familiar". Sure,
 > you can say that but still nobody does in the way people use "懐か
 > しい". I often hear it in the form of an exclamation

"Brings back memories/feelings/old times!"  "Oh, yeah, good old Joe!"
"Wow, a blast from the past!"

Sure, I agree that these expressions are not used so frequently as the
Japanese use "natsukashii", but the emotional content as well as the
information content is quite the same, I think.