I’m Lv5 in WaniKani at the moment(I apologize for my very limited knowledge at the moment) and am getting confused with the meanings of two similar vocabulary words.
近年 seems to mean “recent years”, and 近日 seems to mean “coming days”. Why is the same 近 about the close past in one expression, and the close future in another? Is there some sort of trick for remembering which is which?
Thank you for your help~
3 comments
近 has 2 meanings and 2 pronunciations in Old Chinese.
Old Chinese ~~has~~ is reconstructed to have these spoken causative suffixes, not very different from what modern Japanese has as conjugations. The difference is it was never written explicitly, hence 近 represents both “to be near” and “to cause x to be near”, or in this case, “to approach x”
Why Chinese is relevant here, is because both words are borrowed from Old Chinese and directly used, hence its important to frame why there are 2 meanings here.
There’s no trick here outside of being well read and knowing words really. 近日 works exactly as 近年 now in modern Mandarin, aka “recent days”; Not even speaking Chinese will help you.
Those two were leeches for me for _so_ long. I finally wrote my own mnemonic to help remember them:
“There’s a king (きん) who can see slightly into the future. He can see a few days ahead, and he can remember all his recent years.”
No idea if it helps anyone else, but that helped me remember which “direction” (past or future) has the longer span of time attached.
Thank you, I’ll try to remember that one