"Think" in Japanese
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From Mok Ling:
Mok Ling explains:
In this short video, the Japanese teacher explains the Japanese verb (two verbs?) that mean "to think". According to him, one is a general verb "to think", and the other involves a "deeper" thinking. According to him both are pronounced identically おもう (omou), and differ only in the Kanji used to spell them: 思う for thinking general, nonspecific thoughts, and 想う for deeper and more emotional thoughts.
Surely this is bunk, right? A quick lookup on Wiktionary says おもう is one word that encompasses both meanings and that 思 and 想 are simply variations in spelling. Other spellings include 念, 懐, 憶 — all of which mean "to think" in Chinese.
I decided to ask a Japanese friend if the distinction was actually real or if this was another "鳳凰 means female phoenix and male phoenix" (see below) situation. She pointed me to this website.
As with the original video, Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs apparently prescribes the "lower-higher order thinking" distinction between 思 and 想.
Should the celebrated Chinese poet Li Bo (701-762) have xiǎng 想'd rather than sī 思'd his gùxiāng 故鄉 ("old hometown")?* Or is this standard really as bizarre as it seems to me as a Chinese speaker?
I will further perplex the reader who attempts to answer Mok Ling's question by pointing out that, in Sinitic languages, a very common word is sīxiǎng 思想 ("thought").**
*A note on Li Bo's hyper-famous 20-syllable poem, "Jìng yè sī 靜夜思 / 静夜思" ("Thinking on a Quiet Night"), that is memorized by every Chinese elementary schoolchild.
Chuáng qián míngyuè guāng
Yí shì dìshang shuāng
Jǔtóu wàng míngyuè
Dītóu sī gùxiāng
床前明月光
疑是地上霜
舉頭望明月
低頭思故鄉
Simplified characters
床前明月光
疑是地上霜
举头望明月
低头思故乡
Thinking on a Quiet Night
Moonlight in front of my bed,
I imagine that it is frost on the ground;
Raising my head, I gaze at the moon,
Lowering my head, I think of my old hometown.
**A note on the Sino-Japanese expression M. sīxiǎng / J. shisō 思想
The two characters 思想 occurred next to each other already by the Han-Wei period (roughly 1st-3rd c.), but I wonder when this locution became a fixed expression for abstract thought. Could it be another of one of my "round-trip words" that the Japanese picked up from China and assigned a Western concept / usage to?"'
See Victor H. Mair, "East Asian Round-Trip Words", Sino-Platonic Papers, 34 (October, 1992), p. 12 of 5-13:
思想 Middle Sinitic si-sjangX (v. "brood about") –> (Jap.) shisō (n. "thought") –> (Mand.) n. sīxiǎng ("thought")
In support of Mok Ling, a brief note on "phoenix" and other ancient disyllabic binoms
I have written endlessly on the subject of polysyllabic words in Old Sinitic, e.g., géjiè 蛤蚧("gecko"), shānhú 珊瑚 ("coral"), zhīzhū 蜘蛛 ("spider"), and so forth. So-called "phoenix", fènghuáng 鳳凰 (it does not mean "male and female phoenixes") is one such word.
Miyake (2015) reconstructs Old Chinese pronunciation *N-prəm-s ɢʷˁɑŋ and proposes, though with uncertainty, that the mythical bird's name is the affixed form of 風皇 (“wind sovereign”).
fēng 風 ("wind")
Possibly from Proto-Sino-Tibetan *buŋ (“wind”) (STEDT). Velar nasal final -ŋ, restored later in Middle Chinese (Schuessler, 2007), is preserved in cognates like Proto-Central Naga *m-puŋ, Jingpho mabung, nbung, Drung nvmbeung.
Pronunciations 1, 2, and 3 are all cognates; with both 2 and 3 evolving from *prəm-s, exoactive (with causative suffix -s) of *prəm (Schuessler, 2007). It is unclear how Old Chinese *prəm is related to Tibetan རླུང (rlung) and Proto-Tai *C̬.lɯmᴬ.
Korean 바람 (baram) may have been borrowed from Chinese (Zhao, 2007). The Chinese word has a wide range of extended meanings, and interestingly many of these have exact parallels in the Korean item. Compare Chinese 風流 and 風騷 with Korean 바람둥이 (baramdung'i).
Cognate with:
The development from Old Chinese to Middle Chinese was irregular, driven by dissimilation of the initial and coda bilabial consonants.
Selected readings
- "'Butterfly' words as a source of etymological confusion" (1/28/16)
- "Of knots, pimples, and Sinitic reconstructions" (11/12/18)
- "Of jackal and hide and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/16/18)
- "Of reindeer and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/23/18)
- "Another early polysyllabic Sinitic word" (9/21/21) — with ample bibliography
- "Chasing the Shaman’s Steed: The Horse in Myth from Central Asia to Scandinavia" (free pdf)
Chris Button said,
October 13, 2025 @ 7:20 pm
思う gets the jōyō listing.
Regarding phoenix/wind, this covers it nicely: Takashima & Li "Sacrifice to the wind gods in late Shang China" (2022)
The closing wiktionary citation above is curious. The -m to -ŋ shift is a regular result of dissimilation rather than an "irregular" one.
jhh said,
October 13, 2025 @ 7:35 pm
I thought he was going to compare 思う (omou) and 考える (kangaeru). Omou would be to "hold an opinion" or "ponder," where kangaeru would be more like to "analytically consider a problem."
This double-version of omou reminds me, though of two versions of "kiku:" 聞くand 聴く. The first one is the normal verb to listen or hear, but the second kanji means something like to "listen in a very focused manner."
Jim Breen said,
October 13, 2025 @ 7:49 pm
おもう can indeed be written with alternative kanji. As well as 思う and 想う, there are 憶う, 念う, 懐う, 惟う and 意う. According to the Google Japanese n-grams, 思う is used 97.5% of the time, 想う 1.0% and the rest are mostly noise mentioned in footnotes in dictionaries.
In the JMdict entry for おもう we note that "想う has connotations of heart-felt", which pretty much agrees with video.
Jonathan Smith said,
October 13, 2025 @ 10:49 pm
It's a (UK) programme vs. program thing… or people (US) claim gray vs. grey are connotatively different. Just gets especially awesome/dumb in Japanese.
PeterL said,
October 13, 2025 @ 11:47 pm
There are plenty of cases where Japanese-to-Chinese is one-to-many (that is, Chinese makes a distinction that Japanese doesn't), hence many cases of multiple kanji with slightly different meanings that are pronounced the same in Japanese. Conversely, there are many-to-one words, the classic example being 生 : いきる (ikiru, 生きる, Jōyō)、いかす (ikasu, 生かす, Jōyō)、いける (ikeru, 生ける, Jōyō)、うぶ (ubu, 生)、うむ (umu, 生む, Jōyō)、うまれる (umareru, 生まれる, Jōyō)、うまれる (umareru, 生れる)、うまれ (umare, 生れ)、おう (ou, 生う, Jōyō)、はえる (haeru, 生える, Jōyō)、はやす (hayasu, 生やす, Jōyō)、き (ki, 生, Jōyō)、なま (nama, 生, Jōyō)、なる (naru, 生る)、なす (nasu, 生す)、むす (musu, 生す)
Nanori: あさ (asa)、い (i)、いき (iki)、いく (iku)、いけ (ike)、うぶ (ubu)、うまい (umai)、え (e)、おい (oi)、ぎゅう (gyū)、くるみ (kurumi)、ごせ (gose)、さ (sa)、じょ (jo)、すぎ (sugi)、そ (so)、そう (sō)、ちる (chiru)、なば (naba)、にう (niu)、にゅう (nyū)、ふ (fu)、み (mi)、もう (mō)、よい (yoi)、りゅう (ryū)、みゅう (myū)、ぬく (nuku)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Japanese
David said,
October 13, 2025 @ 11:56 pm
There's also 喜び vs 悦び for joy/happiness as another example.
I don't see why this is so weird, Japanese and Chinese are not the same language. Is it weird that different languages assign different phonemes to different Latin letters?
Michael Watts said,
October 14, 2025 @ 12:45 am
How current is the name "Li Bo"? I notice that China appears to have fully committed to calling him "Li Bai", and that the link in the article above in fact goes to a page titled "Li Bai".
In Naomi Novik's novels there is a dragon named Lung Li Po, the mirror universe version of the historical human, but I would guess that that name came from older English-language treatments of the man rather than any Chinese perspective. (Note the spelling "Po", or for that matter "Lung".)
I share Mok Ling's opinion that the Agency for Cultural Affairs may be describing a state of affairs that it thinks would be nice, but it cannot possibly be describing reality. Two verbs that "just happen" to share their meaning and pronunciation are one verb. (To be totally fair, I also have trouble drawing a distinction between 收 and 受, and they don't even share their pronunciation. They share enough to make things difficult for me.)
I don't see why current Japanese usage would be relevant to 李白, though; he lived a long time ago. From my non-ancient perspective it makes sense to 想 your hometown, although I would translate the verb as "miss" and not "think (of)". It wouldn't make any sense to 思 anything. I only know 思 from its use in personal names.
Nathan said,
October 14, 2025 @ 3:18 am
思う think
想う feel
This is clear from the examples for 想い given in the linked page giving the Agency for Cultural Affairs' interpretation.
Love: emphasizes the depth and purity of emotions, such as sincere feelings, deep affection, and sadness
Family, special occasions: life's turning points and emotional occasions, such as weddings, farewells, and thank-you letters
Message, missive: politely expresses deep emotions and heartfelt wishes
Speech, etc.: resonates with audience to express strong feelings, gratitude, and wishes
Every one of these is about feelings, not (intellectual) "thoughts."
For comparison (off the top of my head), Norwegian — like other Scandy languages, if I remember correctly — distinguishes between tenke, tro, and syne(s) for different gradients of the "think-to-feel" continuum, similarly to the French use of penser vs. trouver, etc. When Anglophones express conviction by saying, "I think…" we often mean "I feel…" because certainty is a feeling not a thought but we'd prefer to think it is.
Chris Button said,
October 14, 2025 @ 5:31 am
@ Nathan
Thanks for sharing that. So it's a more subtle case that isn't deemed consequential enough for jōyō inclusion in both cases?
I'm thinking of alternations like 描くand 書く for "kaku", which are both jōyō readings with a more salient, albeit originally undifferentiated, distinction.
Carlana said,
October 14, 2025 @ 7:18 am
In old Japanese poetry, omou is more like “longing”: I long for you, I long for my hometown, etc. In modern Japanese, omou mostly denotes your current mental state: I think I’ll go to the bank this afternoon, I think vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate. It’s not unusual to pick out word usages by kanji selection. In English, we distinguish “for” from “four” and so on. Using 想う is just a way of signaling you mean something more poetic and less pedestrian.