Re: [Lingo] 上手･上手い

[steve smith <sjs@example.com>]

Josh Glover wrote:
> Not quite. 上手い usually means "excellent", whereas 上手 is almost always
> used to mean "skillful" or "good at". For example, some 焼きそば can be
> 上手い (actually, it would usually be written with just the hiragana うまい,
> AFAIK), but the person who prepared it would be
> 焼きそばを作るのが上手だね。Alternatively, said person could have 焼きそばを上手く作ったなぁ。But
> that person could not have 焼きそばを上手に作った、to the best of my knowledge.
Good.  I love WWW-Jdict but sometimes things like that get lost.

> What you are seeing, as far as I can tell, is the different between
> 大和語 and 漢語。Just as English has words of Germanic origin and words of
> Latin (or Greek) origin that mean the same thing, or almost the same
> thing (e.g. "to say" and "to expound"), Japanese has native Japanese
> words that mean the same thing or almost the same thing as imported
> Chinese words. Often, these are written with the same kanji,
> (especially in the case of verbs), e.g. 朝ごはんand 朝食 or 求める and 請求する。
I think this is really what I wanted to understand.  I remember seeing 
mention of this but hadn't encountered a specific example that I know of 
before.

Thanks a million Josh.

Steve S.