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- "I am a high school student."
"I am a high school student."
Translation:高校生です。
29 Comments
Technically, it is shortened in the other expressions, we've learned here, too.
小学 + 学生 = 小学生
中学 + 学生 = 中学生
大学 + 学生 = 大学生
In all those cases, 学生 is shortened to 生. It's just that there are not two 学 kanji here since the short form 高校 has no 学 kanji. But the 学 kanji of 学生 is removed again.
So it's the same pattern:
高校 + 学生 = 高校生
That is common practice in Japanese. By mixing hiragana, kanji and katakana, parsing a sentence becomes much easier. This is because kanji can convey a lot of meaning in a small space, hiragana has the job of indicating grammatical tense and roles, and katakana for indicating loan words.
For example, compare the following:
- ジョンさんは高校生です。(mixed writing)
- じょんさんはこうこうせいです。(all hiragana)
Once you're familiar with kanji (and radicals), you can look at 高校生 and immediately associate the characters with meaning, whereas in the all hiragana version, you first have to read the whole thing and try to determine where all the different words start and finish so you don't immediately get that こうこうせい means "high (高) school (校) student (生)".
Good try, but 「高校人」doesn't exist in Japanese. There isn't really any explanation for it, except that Japanese native speakers just never thought to use it (because 高校生 already existed). 生 also has connotations of "raw" and "unprocessed", so perhaps it was considered more befitting of students who are "incomplete" adults.
I've copied @Aki-kun 's comment from earlier in this discussion page:
「Technically, it is shortened in the other expressions, we've learned here, too.
小学 + 学生 = 小学生
中学 + 学生 = 中学生
大学 + 学生 = 大学生
In all those cases, 学生 is shortened to 生. It's just that there are not two 学 kanji here since the short form 高校 has no 学 kanji. But the 学 kanji of 学生 is removed again.
So it's the same pattern:
高校 + 学生 = 高校生」
Also, I noticed that you wrote 高騰, which actually means "a sudden jump in price, steep price rise". Clearly, this is because whichever Japanese keyboard you're using doesn't recognize the phrase こうとうがくせい as you imagine it does. That means 高等学生 (which is what I think you meant) isn't widely used in Japanese.