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- "おやすみなさい。"
"おやすみなさい。"
Translation:Good night.
79 Comments
Thanks for your reply.
'お' of 'おやすみなさい' is need when you want to say 'Good night'. maybe originally the same word '休み'. But 'やすみ' without 'お' is a bit different.
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I think this is right, like in another language, in Italian we cannot say buona notte in the evening or night..because it is like a "have a good sleep / sleep well", instead we say buona sera (good evening)
please upvote miszletto again, because apparently he's right. こんばんは is used when greeting someone at evening AND night, and (お)休み(なさい); 休み = やすみ to end a conversation, to say goodnight. https://cotoacademy.com/4-basic-japanese-greetings-greeting-ohayou-konnichiwa-konbanwa-oyasumi-good-moring-evening-night-afternoon/ - "No oyasuminasai"?
@miszletto may not be factually incorrect, but there are two reasons why I will not be removing my downvote.
The first, and most egregious, is the original question they are supposedly answering is "Is おやすみ enough for informal conversation?" Not only is "no" the wrong answer, their elaboration is completely irrelevant.
Secondly, I don't know if English is their primarly language or not, but their explanation is not great.
""oyasuminasai" if you want to sleep" is a gross oversimplification of the actual usage of it, which you summarized quite well. Wanting to sleep is not the only time you might end a conversation at night.
"If you meet someone at night" is also somewhat ambiguous/potentially misleading. "Meet" could refer to meeting someone new, in which case you would still use はじめまして, even if it is nighttime. As you correctly put it, こんばんは functions as a greeting. In this day and age, you might not even be meeting up with someone, but you could still greet them with こんばんは.
It's actually a specific way of conjugating verbs which makes them polite commands. The -なさい conjugation is often used on other verbs by parents instructing their children, or teachers when controlling their students.
As others have pointed out, 休む(やすむ)means "to rest", and by using this conjugation, the speaker is instructing the listener to get some rest. The phrase おやすみなさい no longer carries such a direct meaning, i.e. it's just a greeting now instead of being a command, but that's where it comes from.
Just a little lesson in English here: the correct translation for おやすみなさい is “goodnight”, not “good night”. When the space is present between “good” and “night”, “good” becomes an adjective that describes “night”. おやすみなさい is a phrase that is meant to be used when wishing someone a good night (the phrase is used as a farewell), so the correct translation of おやすみなさい is “goodnight”. The translation of “good night” is 良い夜 「よいよる」where 良い「よい」is an adjective (meaning “good”) and it is being used to describe the noun 夜「よる」(meaning “night”).
It is not. The greeting "good night" is short for "I wish you a good night", where "good" modifies "night".
"Goodnight" is only one word when it itself is an adjective, as in "She gave her daughter a goodnight kiss", or a noun, as in "Their goodnights were punctuated by snoring".
Also, Connor seems to be trying to translate "good night" into Japanese literally, and it just doesn't work that way. おやすみなさい is not a greeting or a farewell. It is something you say as you are literally about to go to bed, not merely part company in the nighttime. おやすみなさい is much closer to "rest now". Different languages say things in their own ways.
100% agree with your English analysis, but in my experience, おやすみなさい is a relatively common parting greeting at night as well, particularly (but not limited to) if it's understood by context that the other party is done for the day and heading home to sleep. I think it tends to be more common in more casual settings, but my point is it's not unheard of :)
1428
Because it's not a literal translation. It translates to 'Get rest' or as an imperative form of 'Rest'. 'Good night' just happens to be the closest thing, connotation-wise, as in, the last thing you say to someone for the day when one of you is going to bed.
こんばんは = Good evening = konbanwa おやすみなさい = Good night = oyasuminasai
Yes, there is a difference. It's only for going to bed.
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/22986405?comment_id=23847824
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Is the little circle at the bottom right hand corner of the end of the phrase a period or spme other punctuation? I have seen it several rimes but never got an explanation and am confused bc they use exclamation points for some phrases but dont show the periods in the english translation. If u could help me I'd appreciate it!
Japanese and English are two entirely different, completely unrelated languages. You are not going to find easy correspondences like that (except for concrete nouns like "apple/りんご").
As explained on this page before, there are a few different phrases in Japanese that get translated into English as "good night", but they are not interchangeable.
おやすみなさい, or just おやすみ, is what you say to someone when one of you is about to literally get into bed and go to sleep. It's more closely translated as "Get some rest."
https://linguaholic.com/linguablog/oyasumi/
こんばんは is a greeting you give when you're out and about in the evening and you run into someone. It breaks down literally:
こん - this
ばん - evening
は - [topic marker]
In Japanese culture, it is polite to leave things implied. For example, you would never come right out and say that your cat is fat. Instead, you would simply remark "ちょっと。。。", which is literally "a little bit..."
Neither of these phrases directly correspond with the English "good night", and we should not expect them to. Different languages say things differently, and English and Japanese are very different.
The hint system doesn't work very well with Japanese because it's such a different language from English. There are a limited number of syllables in Japanese, so any given combination will be a few different homophonic words. Imagine if it gives you the word "notable" but the pop-up hints break it up as "no table".