Is there not a direct translation for the word “some?”

11 comments

1. it really depends on the context it can be translated a bunch of different ways. 何人か is something closer to “some number of people,” or like, “a few people.” if you wanted to say “some people” in the sense of, “some people like to listen to music while they work out,” you can say 「運動しながら音楽を聴く人もいる」literally this translates to something like “people who listen to music while they exercise also exist,” which doesn’t make sense in english really but that’s how the idea is expressed in japanese. if you give me some more examples i could help you with how it works!

2. いくつか might be what you’re looking for?

3. >I asked if this was a general pattern; can you say “何___か?

   Not in this infix form you’re describing. 何___か is more a less a special case. But if you want to find cases where nanka is best translated as ‘some’ you can take formulaic expression like:

   nanka nomuka? 何か飲むか similar to Spanish tomar algo with the shared meaning to take a drink/go to a bar/grab a beer etc.

   Edit:

   So nanka is the informal of nando. It is a marker for exemplification that can be, depending on context, translated as: *and so on; and the like; for example; things like, some*

4. No, there’s no indefinite article. Weren’t you taught that already? And “some” fills that function in English sometimes so you might just omit it if translating directly to Japanese.

   but there are a few ways to say it some like “a few”. いくつか(の)、いくらか、何人か、数人 (a few people)、数時間 (a few hours). You could use 少ない which is “few”. 数 (suu) means “a number” and has a few words besides this for which it is a prefix, but not quite a general use word.

   Or you paraphrase like someone else mentioned: 〜人もいる meaning “there are also people who …”

   When looking it up in a dictionary, though, just have careful because there’s also the meaning of the English “some” which means “a particular”, like if we say “someone” or “some guy”. That you might express as だれか or ある人 (aru in this case *is* a sort of indefinite article I guess, it means “a certain”).

   “many” is usually 多くの〜 or possibly 多い〜.

5. 数人

6. 漢字を学ぶため、フラッシュカードを使っています。（その中、）一部は覚えやすいですけど、一部は全く覚えられません😭
   “I’m using flashcards to learn kanji. (Among those) some are easy to remember but some of them I just can’t remember at all”

   you could also say 他は (the others) for the second part.

7. 覚えている漢字があれば、覚えていないのもある。

8. My old French teacher used to always admonish us that “French is not a code for English.” Well, it may as well be compared to Japanese where the mapping is much more different than European languages due to the languages having less historical development in common. No, there’s not really one word you can consistently map to the English word “some,” but every meaning that it expresses can be expressed in one way or another. In your example (“some I can remember”) I would probably use ある if I wanted to pick some equivalent (i.e., あるフラッシュカード
   = “some flashcards”), but of course you don’t need a “some” equivalent at all to express this idea (for instance 覚えているやつもあれば忘れているやつもある means “there are some I can remember and some I can’t” but not because any one word really expresses “some” there).

9. lol no one has gotten this right yet.

   you can indeed use 何___か as a general form for “some” indeterminate number of objects.

   however, the blank must be filled with a counter word.

   so if you wanted to say “some markers,” you’d say マーカー何本か. 紙何枚か。車何台か。etc. note that 人（にん）is the counter for people.

   rather uniquely, the counter for people is literally only used for people, and therefore it’s redundant and unnecessary to prefix the 何＿か phrase with a clarifying noun, as i’ve done in the other examples above. 人何人か is unnecessary.

   other ways of saying “some” include 数＿ (counter word necessary here as well), 多少の＿ (can only use with mass nouns), ２－３＿ (literally “two or three (counter word),” doesn’t literally mean two or three, closer to “a few”).

   and as other people have indicated, don’t assume that Japanese will or should use a word literally equivalent to “some” in all contexts where English does. communicating something similar to “some I remember” in Japanese wouldn’t use such a word.

10. I don’t have time (or even the knowledge) to get into specifics, but for me, that word for “some” (countable) is いくつか（の…）. (Or いくらか（の…） for uncountable things.)

11. No there isn’t really a direct one to one translation.