Daily Thread: simple questions, comments that don’t need their own posts, and first time posters go here (January 21, 2024)

2 comments

1. I chatted with a japanese person over the Tandem app and wanted to express that a city was **in the valley.** I wrongly wrote 谷の内 for it (I’m really new to putting objects in spacial relation in Japanese, so I haven’t encountered the correct use of words in this context before) and she immediately corrected me, with the use of 谷の合間. But here lies my problem, because I can’t get behind the idea why 合間 was used. I thought maybe she made a spelling mistake and meant 谷の間, between the valley so to speak. So I asked her about it, but she didn’t give me more context, just said it meant “between the valleys”. But when looking up 合間 in dictionarys like Jisho, it doesn’t seem to have a spacial component in it’s meaning, just a temporal one.
   I would be grateful for some insights.

   tldr: why is it 谷の合間 and not 谷の間

2. I’m having difficulty figuring out 余裕 in these sentences below. Especially what 余裕のある生活 really means. I’ve mostly seen it as a surplus, but other example sentences give a sense of “affordance”. So it’s like “A life where you can afford things”, but in a non-monetary sense? A life where you can are able to have things broadly speaking. Or in the first sentence “Affordance of enjoying hobbies”. More like a capacity for doing something?

   These are the sentences, from an essay about why it’s good to have a high paying job.

   しかし、収入が低いと、住む場所、食事などに制限ができたり、趣味を楽しむ余裕がなかったりして、経済的に満足のいく生活が送れないのではないだろうか

   また、定年まで勤められたとしても、貯金がなければ退職後に余裕のある生活は送れないだろう。