Student: Hey sensei, how do you say morning in japanese 🙂
Sensei: that depends on what kind of morning
So basically
けさ = this morning
あさ = any morning
みょうちょう = tomorrow morning
さくちょう = yesterday morning
そうちょう = any early morning
みめい = the very early morning
あさひ = a sunny morning
Oh and you cant use these as greetings, they’re just normal nouns.
Dont worry, you dont need to remember all of them.. except you do. Did that help 🙂
Student: 😨
3 comments
Isn’t 朝日 the morning sun
Well, that’s the same for an English learner, isn’t it? You have to remember tomorrow morning, this morning, any morning, yesterday morning, early morning, very early morning, sunny morning too. That’s like 8 words.
What on Earth are you talking about?
Morning, on its own, is 朝 (asa). Question answered.
All those terms you talk about are variations of this, and they aren’t ‘types’ of morning, but different terms relating to either time or morning.
今朝, literally ‘this’ and ‘morning’, means ‘this morning’. 昨朝 and 明朝, though rare, are variants consistent with times for day; yesterday and tomorrow are 昨日 and 明日 respectively.
早朝 is ‘early’ and ‘morning’. Self-explanatory. 朝日 is ‘morning sun’, and I’ve never seen 未明 (mimei) until now, but ‘not yet’ and ‘bright’ gives some major hints (this is the only one so far not to feature 朝, by the way. That’s why there’s neither ‘asa’ nor ‘chou’).
There are things about Japanese that can be hard to wrap your head around, but the links are there once you get used to them.