In Khatzumoto's post on how he defines fluency after 18 months, he mentions that it took him some time to discover the usefulness of ていうか. I've been scouring dictionaries, E > J and J > J, as well as googling it profusely, but I can't really figure it out.

Anyone want to hold my hand through this?

searching for というか would give you better results. Anyway, it's pretty much what it sounds like it would be. "Say this or..." this other thing. So it gets play in situations ranging from "Er, I meant.." to "In other words" to "What am I saying?"

You can find it in most dictionaries under と言うか or っていうか.

I would normally translate it is something like "in other words ...", "what I mean is ...", "what I meant to say was ...". It is basically used to rephrase or clarify what you have just said, and it is indeed very useful.

Here's a real life example:

There's a machine outside a supermarket which swallows plastic bottles for recycling. It has a conveyor belt which admits the bottles. Initially, my friend and I started stuffing empty plastic bottles into the machine but the conveyor belt just rotated in the oppossite direction and spat them back out at us. We eventually realized that the machine would only allow one bottle to be placed on the conveyor belt at one time. Placing a few on top of each other would cause the belt to rotate in the wrong direction.

I said something along the lines of:

「これ、頭がいいですね」
"Clever machine"

My friend said:

「頭がいいというか、わがままというか・・・」
"Clever? Or lazy?..."
Or more literally, "Should you say clever, or should you say lazy?"

He said this with a less than impressed look on his face (since he wanted to dispose of the bottles quickly)

It made me laugh at the time.

Funny. Just after reading this thread, I came across this dialogue while watching Clannad (ep11):

「俺たち、なんでこんなにあいつのために一生懸命なんだろうなぁ」
「あの子って、なんていうか、ちっちゃい子供みたいなところがあるのよね。ほっとけないっていうか、母性本能をくすぐられるっていうか」

Here, I think, the speaker is not fully confident about the way she is describing something, so she offers multiple alternatives/make multiple attempts using the classical ~か~か construction.

wrightak Wrote:Here's a real life example:

There's a machine outside a supermarket which swallows plastic bottles for recycling. It has a conveyor belt which admits the bottles. Initially, my friend and I started stuffing empty plastic bottles into the machine but the conveyor belt just rotated in the oppossite direction and spat them back out at us. We eventually realized that the machine would only allow one bottle to be placed on the conveyor belt at one time. Placing a few on top of each other would cause the belt to rotate in the wrong direction.

I said something along the lines of:

「これ、頭がいいですね」
"Clever machine"

My friend said:

「頭がいいというか、わがままというか・・・」
"Clever? Or lazy?..."
Or more literally, "Should you say clever, or should you say lazy?"

He said this with a less than impressed look on his face (since he wanted to dispose of the bottles quickly)

It made me laugh at the time.

我が儘 is generally translated as "selfish" though. I guess it's kind of hard to see it as anything other than lazy in this situation however. Interesting how languages can use semantically different words for the same thing.

Perhaps I've been using it wrong, but...It seems every time it comes up here on campus (I'm taking classes -- take it for what you will, I know people here like AJATT), it is used in a joking manner. This came up yesterday between a student and TAs:

先生：今日，眠そうだね。
学生：そうだね。夕べ遅かったから。
先生：なんで？勉強してた？
学生：勉強っていうか・・・

Kind of like a "well I wouldn't exactly call it STUDYING" sort of context, implying that there was something else going on -- in this case, the student was up late with his girlfriend.
All the TAs in the room got a good laugh out of it, so it must have been alright.

just my 1.95752178円

edit: 変な言葉使った,　文法

Here are some examples a Japanese friend gave me:

1. っていうか、あなたいつからそんなに公務員びいきになったのよ？
Besides, since when have you been so biased towards public servants?

2. あの子、悪いと知ってて悪いことをするみたい。っていうか、私の気に障ることをあ

えてするみたい。
It seems like he's doing bad things on purpose. I mean, he does bad things to annoy me.

3. だから…とにかく、いちばん難しい部分、っていうか大切
なのは、（きちんと）面倒を見るってこと。
So... anyway, the challenge or the point is to take care of them.

4. っていうか、お前バカじゃねえ！

So, now I'm thinking that it's kind of a "Besides.." or "In other words..." or "The point is..." kind of thing. Would you guys say that's a pretty accurate assessment?

Edit: Also, he said in more casual situations, you should use てか　or つーか... very informal, though.

I love filler words...

I think now that the original matter has been cleared up, I have a question that I don't really think deserves a new thread, so I'll ask it here...

というか/っていうか and とゆうか/ってゆうか

What's the difference? I don't think there is any meaning wise, but what about usage wise? Is it only appropriate to use one in certain situations?

って is less formal than と. ゆう instead of いう is a slangy form of writing, common in manga. You should probably not use it yourself unless you're sure you're doing it right since it isn't really correct Japanese.

I should have clarified I meant mainly the difference between saying "いう" and ”ゆう” in that context. I am also focusing more on the difference in speech, which is where I see it primarily. Also, I've heard my Japanese friends read ”という～～”　aloud as "とゆう～～”

っつうか・つうか　Is another variation...　They say it a lot and if you don't think they do that's cause you're not listening hard enough （That's how it was for me...)　I think part of the reason is this sound is just less distinct that ていうか　Etc

Ryuujin27 Wrote:Also, I've heard my Japanese friends read ”という～～”　aloud as "とゆう～～”

That's because it's how it's actually pronounced. It's one of those very few cases where how the hiragana is written and how it's actually said are different.

Ryuujin27 Wrote:I should have clarified I meant mainly the difference between saying "いう" and ”ゆう” in that context.

Tobberoth has already answered: pronouncing いう as ゆう is slangy and nothing more. It's easy to confuse the two, however. I don't think that's the way it's pronounced usually, like QuackingShoe said. There is a little difference, but it will be more obvious in written form, of course.

nac_est Wrote:Tobberoth has already answered: pronouncing いう as ゆう is slangy and nothing more. It's easy to confuse the two, however. I don't think that's the way it's pronounced usually, like QuackingShoe said. There is a little difference, but it will be more obvious in written form, of course.

Dunno. I don't have any particularly strong convictions on this point, so I'll yield to whoever feels they have more experience. But, I don't think it's slangy when spoken (as opposed to written); ゆう is the way I was taught, and it seems to be what I hear (take that as you will), and it's the pronunciation listed first in the JA wiktionary.

It's not that I'm super sure, nor I think it's a rule, but I do notice when they use ゆう instead of いう, so some difference should exists. But the former is so common that it may not really matter.
Anyway even though I say it's slangy I wouldn't go as far as saying it's particularly impolite, given the very small difference.

And what about 行く? ゆく or いく?

mentat_kgs Wrote:And what about 行く? ゆく or いく?

That's sort of the same thing, only different

yuku is generally used in a potetic sense, often used in songs and poems. While I'm not sure, I'm guessing it can be used in formal situations as well. iku is simply iku, the modern way of saying the word.

I found an interesting(ish) paper (pdf) which did some analysis of the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. Apparently this is mostly people giving academic presentations and similar sorts of 'layman's public speaking', so by no means incredibly informal.

In this corpus, in adnominal form いう was pronounced /yuH/ more than 92% of the time, and the next highest variant was /yu/ at about 7%.

In adverbal form (ie renyoukei, masu-stem, or いい) 82% of the time it was either /iH/ or /iQ/, whereas /i/, /yu/ and /yuH/ were all small-number also-rans.

(The pronunciation indications are from the paper; H is 'long vowel', Q is the っ stop and the rest looks like standard kunrei-shiki romanisation.)

Which seems to back up what I had previously thought, ie that pronuncing いう as ゆう is completely standard, whereas pronouncing it as-spelt is very rare (plain form only; other inflections are not affected.)

Wow, excellent answers guys! Thanks for backing that all up with papers and research.

I've actually never heard 行く pronounced as ゆく, but then again I don't listen to anything poetic, nor did I even know that was an option, so I bet it slipped by me.

Anyway, I have a couple of Japanese friends visiting soon, so I'll poll them on a couple of pronunciation things.

Ryuujin27 Wrote:I've actually never heard 行く pronounced as ゆく

I have a vague recollection that it's ゆき in things like 名古屋行き meaning "Nagoya-bound" (train or bus), isn't it? Been a while since I was on a train in Japan though so I could be misremembering :-)

I'd classify ゆく as more "alternate reading" rather than just difference in pronunciation.

Oh, and see also 行方不明 (ゆくえふめい) , which is a pretty common word.

pm215 Wrote:

Ryuujin27 Wrote:I've actually never heard 行く pronounced as ゆく

I have a vague recollection that it's ゆき in things like 名古屋行き meaning "Nagoya-bound" (train or bus), isn't it? Been a while since I was on a train in Japan though so I could be misremembering :-)

I'd classify ゆく as more "alternate reading" rather than just difference in pronunciation.

Ahh, you might be right. I think I remember that when I was looking up how to read all those train compounds the day before I went to Japan

Yeah I'd say ゆく is a slightly archaic reading, so you'll mostly find it in fixed expressions, like 行方不明 or 行く手.

tokyostyle Wrote:All you have to do is ride any train in Japan.
間もなく、一番線に快速東京行きがまります。

間もなく、一番線に快速東京行きがまいります。

(my girlfriend is sitting right here and made me correct it)