i learned that 苦痛 （くつう) is a word for pain. However interestingly, I was talking to Chinese friends who said 痛苦 is pain in Chinese. Out of curiosity I looked it up in Japanese and found that 痛苦 (つうく) also means pain.
What’s the difference in meaning and usage, and are there other words like this where swapping the Kanji yields a word with the same meaning?
3 comments
In Old Chinese, you can often find these compounds swapped, and they’re equally usable. This stems from how Old Chinese monosyllabic structure works, so how the speaker chained the 2 words together is mostly open to the speaker.
For example, both forms were attested in Old Chinese texts.
Usually in modern times, in compound words, its the rightmost word that is the basic idea, and the left is an descriptor.
In this case, 苦痛 is used more for physical aspects of it.
Whereas 痛苦 is used more for the mental aspect of it.
苦痛 is a normal word for pain, for “hurts” physically.
痛苦 is rarely used by comparison. It’s about sadness rather than physical pain.
痛み can be used in both cases.
[苦痛](https://ejje.weblio.jp/sentence/content/%E8%8B%A6%E7%97%9B) – 794 example sentences
[痛苦](https://ejje.weblio.jp/sentence/content/%E7%97%9B%E8%8B%A6) – 4 example sentences
for usage always look up examples, if you find it’s hard to get any, then it’s a comparatively rare word and most likely not useful. not everything found in the dictionary is useable, in fact, large swaths are archaic, stiff, awkward, or otherwise hard to utilize properly.
note that merely googling and looking at results is not sufficient most of the time, as their algorithm not only includes “similar matches” but in the case of kanji-based words, it will also return chinese links and count them and that doesn’t help determining how rare it is in japanese.