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Re: [Lingo] 上手・上手い



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.
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