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"Konrad Den Ende" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Listening to Pimsleur i discovered that apparently > "I don't know" = "わかりません" > "I don't understand" = "わかりません" > > What i wonder is how to distinuish between those two > meanings if (when?) they come to colide in the sentence. > Let's engineer a sentence here: > "I don't know and i don't understand". > I have trouble believeing it would be: > "分かりません と 分かりません". You're beginning to get a sense of how Japanese and English do not map onto one another very well at all. Both English meanings are generally given because there are some situations where an English speaker would say "I don't know" while Japanese speaker in the same situation would say 分かりま せん and there are some situations where an English speaker would say "I don't understand" while a Japanese speaker in the same situation might say 分かりません. Even those are very loose "equivalents." Strictly speaking, "I don't know" is closer to 知りません and "I don't understand" is closer to 理解できません. And you might even find translators of the "literal" persuasion translating those English phrases into those "equivalents." The problem is, Japanese generally just don't speak that way in ordinary conversation. They would use わかりません in either situation (generally speaking.) > How is that solved in Japanese? The example in the file was > -"すみません、ひびや道理は どこですか?" > -"分かりません." > How does the questioner know that the questionee: > a) understood the question but didn't know the answer > alternatively > b) didn't understand the question > ? This is where the all important context comes into play (I think it is Sean Holland who likes to say the three most important things in language are context, context and context). Generally, one would assume that the question in this case had been understood (unless, as others had pointed out, there were other contextual clues that suggested they did not understand the question) and that the speaker just didn't know the answer. I think most examples would be fairly easy to deduce. If Japanese ever came upon a situation where it wasn't clear whether the answer was a or b and that information were necessary, they would engage in further conversation to determine the answer, perhaps then turning to words like 知る or 理解する, etc. By the way, you have ひびや道理 written instead of ひびや通り. You must have typed どうり and hit kanji henkan but note that the word is actually written どおり or, if by itself, とおり. There are several examples of Japanese words where the long o is actually extended with the hiragana お and not う, 大きい（おおきい） being another of the more common examples of this. Jeff
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