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AnneC
Meaning of 下手. I saw in a website that 下手 (へた) means unskilled, poor and awkward as well... Is it true? How can I know the meaning of 下手 if it can mean the three words above? Can anybody help me pleeease? '-'
Jan 21, 2014 8:54 PM
Answers · 7
2
Yes, the words you wrote mean へた and it's used as "be bad at". (Please remember that each words are translated into several meaning depending on the context.) Here the examples: I'm bad at speaking English. (= I speak English poorly.) I'm bad at cooking. (= I'm poor at cooking.) I'm bad at drawing. (= I draw poorly.) I hope this helps you.
January 21, 2014
1
I'm by no means a native speaker of Japanese, but I think I can give you an answer. The key is that there are many word in Japanese that have multiple meanings in English depending on the context. Heta can actually mean all of these three. It basically means that you can't do something good (enough). When you can't do something good, then we can say that you are 'unskilled', which pretty much means that you are doing something poorly. And if you do something poorly, well... that means you feel (or look) awkward when doing it right? For example: I'm a poor tennis player : テニスは下手です。 I'm a poor tennis player, so: I'm unskilled in playing tennis. Which makes me look awkward when I miss the tennis ball all the time. (So all 3 of the meaning can work in this situation) Another Japanese word like this: If you want to say that somebody is good in doing something you use 上手 (じょうず) to say that you are efficient/good/natural etc. in doing something. As you see, this word also has multiple meaning (which are pretty close to each other) depending on the context.
January 21, 2014
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