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- Topic: Japanese >
- "トイレ"
39 Comments
"You know, IN THE BATHROOM!"
—NintendoCapriSun
Speaking of, does "toire" refer to the whole bathroom, or just the part where you sit and the rest is history?
When I took Japanese in high school, I believe we learned bathroom as "おてあらい". Is this interchangeable with "トイレ"?
おてあらい are the pure Japanese word. Literally お (polite addition)- て(hand)- あらい (あらう-to wash) "A place to wash hand" ie. Bathroom
While トイレ are word that came from english word toilet.
Both can be use normally. But yes otearai are more polite than toire.
I was hoping to find this, thank you :)
Idk if its just me, but using トイレ sounds weird or too casual, like saying "where is the toilet?" in english. I prefer saying restroom or washroom, personally.
Is it just me, or is the pronunciation really poor on the audio clip? It sounds like "toyay". Is that actually how it's pronounced?
I've found that Japanese R sounds can be soft, especially the ones that are meant to act as L's from non-Japanese words (like "toilet"). So yea, it's pretty soft an r, should sound like: TOY-reh
I've found that the synthetic female sounds are far shakier than the male sounds, so yeah.
Can someone please post how to pronounce this, phonetically? Would really appreciate it!
"restroom" was accepted, can someone explain me why? Can I use "Toire" as "Restroom"? Thank you in advance.
727
Yes, you can use トイレ to mean restroom if by restroom you mean toilet. Toilets are often in a separate room to the bathroom in Japan so although it can refer to a bathroom more often than not it means an actual toilet and/or the separate room where the toilet is.
Ah, thank you. I was wondering if it means bathroom or if it actually just means toilet.
So the I'm guessing because the lessons are aimed at Americans they are going to refer to the toilet as a bathroom.
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Yes, but it is bad practice, isn't it? They should not be using euphemisms in the teaching of languages. The whole point of euphemisms is to obscure meanings, whereas the whole point of teaching languages is to make meanings clear.
I find it annoying that at DuoLingo a bathroom translates to toilet When referring to a place to do your business, why not use restroom or loo (or many other variants) instead? When referring to a place to bath or shower, bathroom is the best application.
Place with a throne: トイレ (toire)、お手洗い (otearai)
Bathroom/powder room (polite form when at someone else's place) 化粧室 (keshoushitsu)
Bathroom 浴室 (yokushitsu)
Katakana words are often made while only hear how the word are spoken. So sometimes there are few characters missing.
And furthermore, often they just dont have the same character structures to translate english to Japanese. So they just change it to the nearest sounded character. For example christmas クリスマス.
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I don't think that is it. I suspect it is more that Japanese people like to abbreviate things.
I've also heard the word べんじょ used before. Does it mean the same thing, or have a different use case?
So I just want to see if I'm understanding this correctly. It seems that トイレ can refer to the room with the toilet, or the porcelain throne itself, depending on the context?
So is it Toide (Toire) or Toi ye( I keep hearing the quick "d" and then on others it sounds like toi - iye
I hope this can help, the Japanese "r" sound is not pronounced like r's in English. The Japanese R is pronounced like a mix between D, L, and R (At least that's how it sounds to me, others might hear it differently.), its made with a quick tap to the alveolar ridge, which is that part behind your upper front teeth that dips back to your hard palette. So, if you wanted to practice it, you could go through the 5 basic (as in non-merged, like "ryu") sounds/ letters.
ら = "ra" (like rah)
り= "ri" (as in ree, with the hard E noise, not eh)
る = "ru" (Like roo)
れ = "re" (Like reh)
ろ = "ro" (Like roh/row)
I know you probably know this but, yknow, just a small help :)
I was presented with "Bathroom", "Restroom", and toilet as options, so I came here to figure out which was the best option.
Rules for the トイレ: 一: Sit and sht in an orderly manner. 二: No peeing in the トイレ standing up. (Your ペン15 is fat, smelly and disgusting.) No puking in the トイレ. (Nobody needs to see or smell your 酒-induced vomit.) No sitting and shtting like a damn retard. (People from 台湾 can see your sht coming out of your ass when you do that.) No fishing. (What the hell? Nobody will ever do that. What would you catch? Maybe somebody else's sht.) No sh*tting in the urinal. (That's the best idea I have ever heard.)
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