Dumb question probably, maybe right up there with is the traffic light color green or blue, but I recently ran into a misunderstanding as to what snowing means to/in Japanese.
My understand of “snowing” in English is that there are snowflakes coming down. It does not necessarily mean that the snow is sticking.
The Japanese people I was talking to yesterday, they indicated that it never snows in a particular city. But I’ve been there and experienced the snow falling. In their thought process, as the snow wasn’t sticking, it wasn’t really snowing. Snow accumulating on the ground is snowing, snow flakes falling from the sky was not snowing.
Like I said, dumb question, but is there a mismatch in what “it’s snowing outside” means versus “雪が降っています”?
Or am I just bad at English?
by fruit-punch-69
2 comments
Maybe it’s just those Japanese people you were talking to but 雪が降っています absolutely means it’s snowing, regardless of whether or not it’s sticking to the ground. I mean, 降る means falling from the sky, so yeah, snow falling from the sky is snowing…. but I think, even in English there might be a few people that don’t consider it to be snowing if it’s not sticking to the ground.
Maybe their definition of snow is more like dry/powdery snow? The other day, when it was snowing in Tokyo, I noticed some people referred to it as 雪, while others called it 霙（みぞれ）, a mix of rain and snow.