In English you’d probably use it as “just then” to indicate a period of time right before the conversation time. My native language also has a specific word to indicate the same window of time.
In Filipino we also don’t have the equivalent of that word as a noun, it’s either exclusively used as an adjective or adverb. Our 先(saki) is called “dati”.
I’m pretty sure English has it’s own equivalents. If you mean previous as a noun, then consider “ex” in English, which can be used like a noun, or prior with a meaning like antecedent or ancestor.
In my opinion classification of words is a bit tricky. As far as I know we consider nouns as words that can be used as a subject. While adjectives are words used to describe other words. Notice that both adjectives and nouns can be used for 2 slightly different types of descriptions like “beautiful person” and “chicken soup”. There are several differences between these like subjective/objective or constant/temporal, but the easiest is probably to consider adjectives like a degree. If we can say “a little bit” or “very”, then it should be adjectives, and “a little bit chicken (soup)” wouldn’t make much sense.
I think the reason why “previous” isn’t considered a noun in English, because we don’t use it as a subject, but notice that previous doesn’t scale very much, it rather flips with later/following/subsequent, than talks about “a little bit <–> a lot (previous)” and it’s a trait of の-adjectives in Japanese (when we use の connection instead of な like 先の), which are very similar to nouns. You can see that in both English and Japanese it behaves in a similar manner, closer to a noun than full adjective. And if you look at sentences where 先 is used with は (which probably would be a full noun), these can be translated into English with similar nouns too. While 先に (adverb) would similarly be translated into adverbs too.
English and Japanese are two completely separate languages, so it’s normal that things are different between them. I think you’ll hurt your Japanese studies if you get too caught up in that. Just accept that it is what it is, learn it correctly, and continue on your path to fluency
item one in a list of a million reasons why direct translation is a terrible mistake and a bad habit to get into; the languages are highly dissimilar, they do not even match up in tense or part of speech
i understand your curiosity, but you’re asking the wrong question. what i think you should try asking is somethlng like: “this is different. how do i use it?”
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In English you’d probably use it as “just then” to indicate a period of time right before the conversation time. My native language also has a specific word to indicate the same window of time.
In Filipino we also don’t have the equivalent of that word as a noun, it’s either exclusively used as an adjective or adverb. Our 先(saki) is called “dati”.
I’m pretty sure English has it’s own equivalents. If you mean previous as a noun, then consider “ex” in English, which can be used like a noun, or prior with a meaning like antecedent or ancestor.
In my opinion classification of words is a bit tricky. As far as I know we consider nouns as words that can be used as a subject. While adjectives are words used to describe other words. Notice that both adjectives and nouns can be used for 2 slightly different types of descriptions like “beautiful person” and “chicken soup”. There are several differences between these like subjective/objective or constant/temporal, but the easiest is probably to consider adjectives like a degree. If we can say “a little bit” or “very”, then it should be adjectives, and “a little bit chicken (soup)” wouldn’t make much sense.
I think the reason why “previous” isn’t considered a noun in English, because we don’t use it as a subject, but notice that previous doesn’t scale very much, it rather flips with later/following/subsequent, than talks about “a little bit <–> a lot (previous)” and it’s a trait of の-adjectives in Japanese (when we use の connection instead of な like 先の), which are very similar to nouns. You can see that in both English and Japanese it behaves in a similar manner, closer to a noun than full adjective. And if you look at sentences where 先 is used with は (which probably would be a full noun), these can be translated into English with similar nouns too. While 先に (adverb) would similarly be translated into adverbs too.
English and Japanese are two completely separate languages, so it’s normal that things are different between them. I think you’ll hurt your Japanese studies if you get too caught up in that. Just accept that it is what it is, learn it correctly, and continue on your path to fluency
item one in a list of a million reasons why direct translation is a terrible mistake and a bad habit to get into; the languages are highly dissimilar, they do not even match up in tense or part of speech
i understand your curiosity, but you’re asking the wrong question. what i think you should try asking is somethlng like: “this is different. how do i use it?”