In Genki I:

Quote:うちに来ています。
Somebody has come over to visit.

Quote:私のうちに遊びに来てください。
Please come and see us.

What does it means "うち" in this context? In other examples this word is used as "house", written in kana, so it is the same here?

A more literal translation can be this?

"Somebody has come home (to visit)";

"Please come to my house (and see us)";

Yes; it's 家 and chiefly used to refer to one's own home/household (家 can also be read いえ, with the same meaning minus the "one's own" connotation).

Your first literal translation is wrong; the someone (actually, I get the sense that it's a specific person, not merely a "someone") is at the speaker's home, not his own.

Vempele Wrote:Yes; it's 家 and chiefly used to refer to one's own home/household (家 can also be read いえ, with the same meaning minus the "one's own" connotation).

Your first literal translation is wrong; the someone (actually, I get the sense that it's a specific person, not merely a "someone") is at the speaker's home, not his own.

Wow thank you! Also for the "いえ　vs　うち" explanation! Yes my english is bad so I've written the wrong translation thinking its meaning is the one you gave ahaha

うち gets used a lot outside of just meaning "the house." Stuff like うちの娘　うちの息子, and so on. I've seen some slightly more strange uses (that I can't think of) which make it hard to follow with the "household" meaning though I guess they apply. I've honestly come to associate it more with 'possessing' something "close to the heart."

I think of it as a sense of belonging to a community. うちの~: "~ of our family/company/school/...", probably all the way up to national identity, whichever group the speaker and listener have in common (or specifically not in common, if it's in contrast to the listener's group).

for vix86 and Vampele: in those cases it can be written in kanji or it must be written in kana only?

vix86 Wrote:うち gets used a lot outside of just meaning "the house." Stuff like うちの娘　うちの息子, and so on. I've seen some slightly more strange uses (that I can't think of) which make it hard to follow with the "household" meaning though I guess they apply. I've honestly come to associate it more with 'possessing' something "close to the heart."

I've always thought of うち having the connotation of 'the (familial) house'; almost like a living inclusive version of 'the estate', it's the relation of numerous individuals and objects in the home to the home owner as a single unit. It's not very common to refer to the residence of a house as 'the house' or 'the home' in English (outside of 'royal speak'), but I have seen it used that way before.
Anyway, thinking of it like that, you get うちの娘/息子 to literally mean 'the daughter/son of the home'; 'the home' is the central unit of individuals and 'daughter/son' is the position the individual has in that unit.

Of course, it can be used outside of a family context, like with a business, but it still functions the same way; the central unit of the business is populated by employees and has ownership of property. And of course, the larger the unit, the more it is identified by itself than its head (this is the case with prominent families (historically) as well as businesses).

That's my understanding, at least.

I looked it up and it turns out うち is
家: family, etc.
内: the more general group I described (and a whole bunch of other meanings that are dissimilar to 家 so I won't get into them).

内 is usually (but is by no means required to be) in kana when it doesn't mean "inside". 家 is commonly spelled in kanji regardless of reading, but a quick googling suggests that kana is more common in this usage (家の娘 vs. うちの娘: 家の娘 has slightly more results but in most of them, 家 is used as a suffix and is therefore read け).

The reason it's spelled in kana with things like うちの娘 is because uchi can also be another way of saying I, like ore, boku, etc, but uchi is used by women. When uchi means "I" it's usually spelled in kana, from my understanding of it at least.

My textbook taught us that うち was more along the lines of "my own home" whereas いえ was more of a generic house type of term. I always thought of it as something like:
"I invite someone over to my うち" vs. "I'm going to the neighbor's いえ"

I remember seeing うち in dramas where it was translated in the subs as somewhere along the lines of "I", but of a different dialect and less polite than 私. It was a fansub, so it might have not quite been right, but that was the understanding I gleaned from that, and it did seem to make some sense. I remember one of the main characters, who came from a more rural area to a suburb type area got scolded a lot by her peers for using it instead of 私

Bokusenou Wrote:The reason it's spelled in kana with things like うちの娘 is because uchi can also be another way of saying I, like ore, boku, etc, but uchi is used by women. When uchi means "I" it's usually spelled in kana, from my understanding of it at least.

I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but the うち in うちの娘 is not the first person pronoun. The うち here means household, and it's simply that you can describe your own daughter as 'the daughter of my household.'

Men as well as women use the phrase うちの娘 to describe their daughter (or things like うちの車 to describe their car), which is just one of the reasons why it's easy to tell that it's not the first person pronoun. Also, as far as I know うち isn't used throughout all of Japan as a pronoun, and it's generally only used by women until their early 20s at the latest--it's rare to find 30 year old women that are using the pronoun うち.

Tzadeck has it right -- if the phrase うちのＸ is describing something in their family (or company/school/etc) it's standard Japanese used by any gender or age. It's only dialectical when used more widely, where most speakers would use 私/僕/etc.

うちの娘 is unlikely to mean 私の娘 because 娘 already means "my daughter" so you don't have to have the 私の. (うちの娘 is also redundant; in my experience this is more common as something like うちの花子ちゃん. But natural language is sometimes redundant.)