I was watching the drama 家政婦の三田 today, and there was a part of the conversation I couldn't figure out.

One of the characters says to her dad that instead of always yelling "うるさい！", that he should instead try saying "うるさいなり" because it wouldn't be so scary.

What does なり mean here? I couldn't figure this out at all...

どうもすいません。

Whats this word/phrase?

@vix - Just because some people decide to use a ridiculously long, hard to navigate 2chan-style thread to ask questions, that doesn't mean everyone should have to.


@mottles - I asked my wife about this and she wasn't sure either, but her hypothesis is that it would give him a "ふざけている" nuance and that's why the girl asked him to do it.
She said it might also have something to do with the robot character in Kiretsu Daihyakka, who talks like this.

I don't have an answer, but that's a very disturbing drama. My wife loved it, but the tone is all over the place and the plot just makes me cringe.

JimmySeal Wrote:@vix - Just because some people decide to use a ridiculously long, hard to navigate 2chan-style thread to ask questions, that doesn't mean everyone should have to.

It also doesn't mean everyone should create a new thread every time they want to know what something means. When they could just as easily posted it in the 2chan style thread and gotten 2-3 replies that answered the question.

I find it annoying, but ultimately its up to ファブリス if he's ok with people making tons of threads like this.

The "Whats this word/phrase?"-thread has many questions answered already, also long and as I find good replies by magamo and other very experienced users who possess excellent explaining skills! It's a pity, though, that this ressource is difficult to use, as nobody would look through all the pages when having a question.

Best thing would be, if the questions could be collected and linked to the respective posts. Like this we could have a nice database

Tori-kun Wrote:The "Whats this word/phrase?"-thread has many questions answered already, also long and as I find good replies by magamo and other very experienced users who possess excellent explaining skills! It's a pity, though, that this ressource is difficult to use, as nobody would look through all the pages when having a question.

Best thing would be, if the questions could be collected and linked to the respective posts. Like this we could have a nice database

It would be very useful and easy to use if we had a proper search here (no searching in Japanese on Japanese learning site is pretty ridiculous). I saw info somewhere there will be an overhaul (or complete switch) of forum backend so we just need to be patient and pray for decent functionalities.

I'd love to see some kind of tagging system for posts so we could have even more search options once people would start tagging their answers.

More info about users would also be nice (optional ofc), things like: certificates, nationality (small flag before the name would be enough), years learning Japanese and/or time spent in Japan. I understand some people aren't fond of such things but thats why they should be optional for those that are comfortable sharing such info.

thurd Wrote:I'd love to see some kind of tagging system for posts so we could have even more search options once people would start tagging their answers.

Z ust mi pan to wyjął Panie turd

Eng: My thoughts exactly.

vix86 Wrote:It also doesn't mean everyone should create a new thread every time they want to know what something means. When they could just as easily posted it in the 2chan style thread and gotten 2-3 replies that answered the question.

Really? I think that's their prerogative if they want to do so. I could understand it being a problem if there were hundreds of them daily filling up the recent topics list, but if there are 1 or 2 a week, so what?

I personally find those absurdly long threads rather offputting. It's like a roomful of people trying to carry on several different conversations by screaming from opposite sides of the room. It's almost tolerable on 2chan because of the backreferences, but this forum doesn't even have that.

JimmySeal Wrote:I personally find those absurdly long threads rather offputting. It's like a roomful of people trying to carry on several different conversations by screaming from opposite sides of the room. It's almost tolerable on 2chan because of the backreferences, but this forum doesn't even have that.

You keep drawing the comparison that the "What's this word/phrase mean?" thread is like some giant 2ch thread or something but its not. Most questions/posts in the thread only have a lifetime of about 5-6 posts at MAX maybe on the rare occasion something will come up and it'll go a page but its not some horrid mess as you seem to think it is.

This is just one my pet peeves about forums.

JimmySeal Wrote:

vix86 Wrote:It also doesn't mean everyone should create a new thread every time they want to know what something means. When they could just as easily posted it in the 2chan style thread and gotten 2-3 replies that answered the question.

Really? I think that's their prerogative if they want to do so. I could understand it being a problem if there were hundreds of them daily filling up the recent topics list, but if there are 1 or 2 a week, so what?

I personally find those absurdly long threads rather offputting. It's like a roomful of people trying to carry on several different conversations by screaming from opposite sides of the room. It's almost tolerable on 2chan because of the backreferences, but this forum doesn't even have that.

Long threads usually have two useful parts. The beginning which the original thread owner may or may not update continuously (the subs2srs thread is famous here). The end which has resent comments which anyone subscribed to the thread or cares to check out will see. Everything in the middle can safely be ignored.

The worst that happens is the post/reply war which gets solved quickly with a 24/48 hour lock.

Mind you, this forum for the most part acts much more mature than any other forum I've experienced. That's part of the reason you can have 5+ year long threads which still have people making posts.

vix86 Wrote:You keep drawing the comparison that the "What's this word/phrase mean?" thread is like some giant 2ch thread or something but its not. Most questions/posts in the thread only have a lifetime of about 5-6 posts at MAX maybe on the rare occasion something will come up and it'll go a page but its not some horrid mess as you seem to think it is.

Ok, be that as it may, people looking to help out in that thread still have to sift through a pile of stuff to locate any incoming questions that they might be able to answer. When someone opens a new thread with a clear title like this one, people have a pretty good idea what the question is about before they even click on it.

And you still haven't given a fraction of an explanation why people creating individual threads for individual questions is so detestable.

JimmySeal Wrote:And you still haven't given a fraction of an explanation why people creating individual threads for individual questions is so detestable.

Because its clogs forums up with tons of small seemingly useless threads. Threads should generally be made when there is a potential for a small discussion. Every odd question about "what does this mean, from X show/book?" doesn't deserve a thread. When you get tons of these it makes it harder if you ever actually need to sift through pages in a forum to find other topics. I can also make it harder to hunt down single posts if something interested you. For instance, imagine half the posts in the "Whats this mean?" thread were in their own posts instead. Now imagine that you remember seeing in some post, something that megamo said that was particularly informative that you wanted to go back and check. Because there have been a 100 new similar threads opened, you can't recall which one it is. Were stuff simply centralized in a single thread you could just go page by page till you found what you wanted.

Like I said, its a pet peeve of mine because lots of small threads of similar aim/topic seems disorderly when you can file-cabinet it away in a single thread.

1. The way the search currently works, it gives you a link to the thread, not any individual post. I'm not willing to look through/read 196 pages, post by post, for my answer; are you??? Short threads are MUCH better in this case. So what if the search is being revamped in the future? This magical, amazing, more functional search isn't here now, so we have to work with what we've got.

2. Crosstalk in the "What's this word/phrase?" thread makes it more likely that someone's question will be missed...never mind sifting through other questions/answers to see if anyone DID answer the question you care about.

うるさいなり doesn't really mean anything it's just an annoying way of talking. Funnily enough since everyone's talking about 2ch you might wanna check it out since this type of なり is used mostly on the internet by pricks who just want to irritate others, and it seems to do the job.
It may be cultural references as JimmySeal pointed out though, most Japanese people will associate this type of speech with the anime Kiretsu Daihyakka because the main character ends pretty much all his sentences with なり. Is it because he's a samurai (or something) or what? I don't honestly know, could be a super-old usage I don't know about or something really simple I'm overlooking. Check out the Twitter to get an example of usage though...

http://twitter.com/#!/korosukewagahai

Ultimately it means nothing. Just don't go around using it unless you wanna sound like a right twat... not recommended haha.

mottles Wrote:I was watching the drama 家政婦の三田 today, and there was a part of the conversation I couldn't figure out......
どうもすいません。

mottles, Thank you for your post. The responses that were on topic were interesting. The responses made me realize I was a bit off in what I thought it meant.

Using なり at the end of a sentence is probably intended to imitate one of the following, which are old grammatical elements:

http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/jn2/165...%E3%82%8A/
http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/jn2/165...%E3%82%8A/

However, the Kiretsu Daihyakka character's indiscriminate use of it on nearly every sentence is probably due to him being both a samurai and a robot (ergo both old and unnatural speech).

raeesmerelda Wrote:1. The way the search currently works, it gives you a link to the thread, not any individual post. I'm not willing to look through/read 196 pages, post by post, for my answer; are you??? Short threads are MUCH better in this case. So what if the search is being revamped in the future? This magical, amazing, more functional search isn't here now, so we have to work with what we've got.

Bottom of search page: Show results as -> posts. Click the post dates to jump directly to posts in thread.

[ファブリス]

vix86 Wrote:I find it annoying, but ultimately its up to ファブリス if he's ok with people making tons of threads like this.

What's the problem? That's what topics are for. (?_?)

Database-wise it makes no difference, topics are series of individual posts.

I suppose lots of tiny topics may clutter the Recent Topics list but we've yet to see this.

The forum is not a wiki. Long threads I think are best for collections of resources. Usually I'd think it's easier to make every topic around a specific subject.

Personally I am more annoyed by people's laziness in naming topics (ie. if it's a question, then make the topic title a question). ie: What does なり mean in うるさいなり ?

I would personally prefer a "what's this word or phrase" subforum rather than a single thread.

ファブリス Wrote:

vix86 Wrote:I find it annoying, but ultimately its up to ファブリス if he's ok with people making tons of threads like this.

What's the problem? That's what topics are for. (?_?)

Database-wise it makes no difference, topics are series of individual posts.

I suppose lots of tiny topics may clutter the Recent Topics list but we've yet to see this.

The forum is not a wiki. Long threads I think are best for collections of resources. Usually I'd think it's easier to make every topic around a specific subject.

Personally I am more annoyed by people's laziness in naming topics (ie. if it's a question, then make the topic title a question). ie: What does なり mean in うるさいなり ?

I have experience with both. Large thread collections, and individual (temporary) forum sections. Both had their advantages and disatvantages. One of the advantages of one topic versus many is, that if a message remains unanswered, the person asking can post it a second time. What was important was the function to change the title. (It was a gaming community) and every member could change the title accordingly. "Level 3-19 Quest title" for instance. The downside of this was that we as moderators had to have an eye on the individual topic headers. We changed it, so that a particular section could be found easily, so that others can be pointed to the search function, instead of asking twice.

Having a seperate forum is also good, provided that the titles names give away, what the question is about. Which is not always as easy as it seems. Or has anyone not at one point had trouble finding a suitable title? CONFESS! For finding information, it might not always be an advantage, once the forum has lots of topics, and many individual posts. In the end it would be like in the big thread we have now, just that the information is all over the place, and moderators have to pay more attention to titles and contents.

The best way is a multi-level search function. Or lets rather say it is the best compromise between both. Meaning:

- Individual words
- Full Sentence Search
- Direct Link to a search result not the topic itself (which renders the search function useless for this purpose)
- Dates (between X and Y)
- Wildcard Search
- Working UTF-8 Kanji / Hanzi support

The nature of a forum is not being a Wiki, which was clear all the while, though there is really a need of quick access to certain information. This, in turn, will prevent asking questions that have been answered in one way or another.

@mottles,

Like JimmySeal, I asked my spouse the same question. She said it's just an anime character's catchphrase in that the character ends everything it says with なり. I don't watch anime so I can't think of other examples, though "Last Christmas" had an ep where the lady talked the stern guy into adding ぽい at the end of what he says like a certain anime.

Basically, for the narrative, it was meant to make the almost pathological maid seem more friendly.

thurd Wrote:It would be very useful and easy to use if we had a proper search here (no searching in Japanese on Japanese learning site is pretty ridiculous).

Doing a google search for "site:koohii.com なになに" makes a reasonable substitute in the meantime...