I’ve noticed a trend while learning vocabulary on a couple of things.
For instance じん or にん when describing a person, I feel like じん tends to be more masculine and にん is more passive (feminine for lack of a better description)
がつ seems to be used when the month is specified 二月(にがつ)
げつ when the month is not necessary specified 毎月(まいげつ)
I might be totally wrong but it’s helped me remember the words because I associate the memorization with these “rules”
Does anyone else have any examples of things you’ve noticed that are either kind of unspoken rules or rules that aren’t really MENTIONED enough?
(For instance I thought I was clever in thinking that verbs with I and a sounds are generally intransitive because a and I are stand alone words in English and e verbs aren’t because e can’t stand alone but there are actual rules that weren’t really mentioned enough through the mediums I’ve studied lol)
Edit: grammar is my weak point (clearly) so forgive me for any confusion for the above mentioned vowel stuff lol
4 comments
Don’t associate masculinity vs femininity to じん/にん is all I can say. You’re right that month names use がつ and in other words it’s げつ. But there also used to be month names with げつ, just the がつ ones won out. These things just happened arbitrarily over the course of history. The reason multiple readings exist is because the reading were imported from China at different times, centuries apart. Some readings stick for some words and other readings stick for others.
Also not sure what you mean by “verbs with i and a sounds”. Verbs with certain endings tend to be transitive: -asu and -eru namely.
Feel free to use whatever mnemonics work for you I think.
What do you mean about masculinity of にん vs じん?
> がつ seems to be used when the month is specified, げつ when the month is not necessary specified
That does seem to mostly hold true, but for example 何月 is なんがつ even though that’s about as unspecified as you can get. Also 月日 and 正月, although the latter is a specific period of time, just not necessarily a month
I doubt this is actually a real rule though, probably just coincidence that the 呉音 is used for months and the 漢音 for almost everything else
> 毎月(まいげつ)
Afaik the reading for that is overwhelmingly まいつき
edo jidai 浪人 want to talk with you lol