Quote:
Originally Posted by princessmarisa
thank you for the honesty, I hope over time I will start to know the words only in their own context. Yet as a beginner I guess I use these cheating shortcuts, almost subconsciously the first 2-3times I see a word to help grasp some meaning out of the sentence.
Any tips for how to stop this, if it will be so detrimental?
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I think that thinking of stuff literally is OK, but use that as a starting point; from there, you can expand the meaning to
similar meanings within a class of meanings. Maybe what I mean is something like: Don't let yourself get distracted by idiomatic expressions like you seem to be doing. "To cut" has many idiomatic meanings; chief among them are to turn something off, remove someone from a team, or sneak in front of another person who has queued up already (trying my best to use the Britishism "queue up" instead of the Americanism "line up" for you!).
OK, below I think I better express what I'm trying to say, but I don't want to delete what I said above, either.
For example, take the English "that sucks!" Imagine you learn 吸う, which means "to suck" like with your mouth. You do
not want to start thinking about how "that sucks!" is "obviously" それは吸っている in Japanese. In reverse, タバコを吸う is to smoke a cigarette (IIRC). Don't assume 吸う means "to smoke" and then say 家が吸っている for "my house is smoking [and on fire]." Regognize the class of meaning 吸う represents (air traveling through an opening/orifice/mouth/whatever) and learn various ways that concept is expressed in English (whistling, suck through a straw, smoke [because you suck air through your mouth], etc.) and find out if you can use 吸う that way.
Summation: Learn to tell the difference between different classes of meanings of a word. If you learn 切る for "to cut," don't immediately assume it can be used every time it can be used in Japanese. Recognize that "to cut" has many classes of meaning, and only one of them is to slice through something. If you have sentences "cut my finger," "cut some paper," and "cut in line," recognize that one of these three "cut"s does not belong to the class of meaning that is "use a sharp object to slice through another object."
Now, I'm not sure if you can talk about 切る when saying "to cut in line." You might be able to. If so, it's because the idiomatic meaning of "to cut" here is still very similar. Namely, it has to do with using your body to split a line into two parts and insert yourself between them.
And things go the other way, too, with translations: 張り切る, for example, seems to be literally "to pull/stretch and cut," but it actually means "to be full of pep/vigor/energy." Don't assume that because it has something to do with being "full" that you can say おなかが張り切る to mean "stomach is full [of food]."
I hope I've made things clearer. To be honest, this sort of thing always came very naturally to me, and I was befuddled by classmates who make the mistake I'm trying to address in this post. Only later did I realize that it actually doesn't inherently make sense.
I probably just internalized this rule when I was younger, since I was exposed to foreign languages from a very early age (mom: French; cousin: Spanish; great-grandparents: German).