help short translation

[AnthonyS]

hello,

please help me. what means that "基本お暇" ?

thank you.

[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by AnthonyS

hello,

please help me. what means that "基本お暇" ?

thank you.

"Fundamental free time"

Where did you pull this from? I can't say it seems natural to me to just have those four glyphs together, but I could be wrong.

基本（きほん）=fundamentals/foundation

お=honorific prefix for non-Sino-Japanese vocabulary in Japanese (the Sino-Japanese honorific prefix is ご as in ごかぞく ("your family") and ご主人 ("your husband").

暇 （ほま）=free time

For what it's worth, I'm near-fluent but not fluent or native.

[Sashimister]

Originally Posted by KyleGoetz

"Fundamental free time"

Not quite. It means "Are you free, basically?" The speaker is asking if the other person has time most of the time.

[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by Sashimister

Not quite. It means "Are you free, basically?" The speaker is asking if the other person has time most of the time.

Thank you. It's things like this that serve as a reminder that, no matter how many kanji and vocabulary I may know, there are still times I'm going to get totally tripped up.

I suppose the お should have been a hint it was something being said to another person (hence the honorific prefix).

I know Japanese is a lot less rigorous about punctuation than English, but would it have been better to have 基本、お暇 instead? I can't quite figure out how the phrase is supposed to sound (where pauses go).

[Sashimister]

Originally Posted by KyleGoetz

Thank you. It's things like this that serve as a reminder that, no matter how many kanji and vocabulary I may know, there are still times I'm going to get totally tripped up.

I suppose the お should have been a hint it was something being said to another person (hence the honorific prefix).

I just realized that the question mark was outside of the quotation marks. In that case it may be a statement. "I'm mostly free."

This お is not the real honorific in either case. It's a playful kind of お that people sometimes use to sound comical and we even use it to say things about ourselves.

基本 probably mislead you as well. This is short for 基本的には （or　ほとんどいつも） in very casual conversation. This usage has been in existence for only 10-15 years now. (= basically, most of the time, in principle)

You will often hear phrases like:
基本ＯＫ
基本ダメ　ＯＲ　基本ＮＧ
アタシ基本お肉ダメ
オレ基本自己中

No particles, no verbs, nothing.....

[Sashimister]

Originally Posted by KyleGoetz

I know Japanese is a lot less rigorous about punctuation than English, but would it have been better to have 基本、お暇 instead? I can't quite figure out how the phrase is supposed to sound (where pauses go).

Young people here seldom use punctuation in texting.
You can pretend there's a comma there but the true problem is that 基本 originally cannot be used that way in the first place, which is part of what must have confused you.

If what I learned in elementary counts these days, I would say:
Statement 「基本的に暇です。」
Question 「基本的にお暇ですか。」

[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by Sashimister

If what I learned in elementary counts these days, I would say:
Statement 「基本的に暇です。」
Question 「基本的にお暇ですか。」

Whew! When I saw your translation, I wondered why these weren't the correct way. Glad to hear they are.

And I didn't dream it was a text. That's why I asked for the source. Had I know that, well, I don't know if I could have translated it accurately, but at least I wouldn't have instantly thought "that cannot be correct grammar!" like I did.

Thanks.