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Lesson 35: より, のほう, and いっぽう

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Today we're going to talk about "yori" and "hou".

Now, "yori" and "hou" are often introduced together in sentences like: "Meari yori Sakura-no hou-ga kirei da."

And that is a slightly verbose way of saying "Sakura is prettier than Mary".

I think this is an unfortunate way of introducing the two terms because it can easily give rise to confusion.

It can be difficult to understand what term is doing what and how they relate to the rest of the sentence.

It's much easier if we look at these two separate and independent terms, both important in its own right, separately, and then we can put them together.

So let's start by looking at "yori".

Yori is a particle.

It's not one of our logical particles, so it does not have to be attached to a noun.

It can go after just about anything: a complete logical sentence, a noun, an adjective, a verb -- whatever we want.

Its basic physical meaning is "from".

When we send a letter, we may say "Sakura yori" -- "from Sakura".

And abstract words all have their base in physical metaphors, even if we sometimes forget the physical metaphor, and with words like this, it's useful to begin by understanding the original literal meaning and then seeing how the metaphor works.

So "yori" means "from", and we already have another word meaning "from", don't we?

And that's "kara".

Now, there is a difference between the two, which is particularly pronounced as we start to apply them metaphorically.

"Kara" marks the "A" in "A from B" in such a way that it is treating "A" as the starting point or point of origin.

So, if I say "Nihon kara kimashita", I'm saying "I came (or come) from Japan / Japan is my point of origin."

And this in a way is midway between the literal, physical meaning and the metaphorical meaning, because it can mean literally I just came on a plane from Japan or it can imply that I'm Japanese or that I was raised in Japan or something like that.

When we move to its purely metaphorical meaning, it usually means "because".

In other words, "A" is the point of origin of "B".

"Samui kara ko-to wo kiru" -- "Because it's cold, I wear a coat" / "From the fact that it's cold, I'm wearing a coat."

Now, "yori" means "from" in a very different sense.

The directional metaphor is concentrating not on the origin of A from B, but in the distance or difference of A from B. So, if we say "Sakura-wa Meari yori kirei da" we're saying that "from Mary" Sakura is pretty.

What we mean by this is that distinguished from Mary, Sakura is pretty.

Now, it does have something in common with "kara" because we're still using Mary as the base point, the point of comparison.

And because of this, because it has a comparative meaning, we're not saying Sakura is pretty but Mary isn't.

We're saying that, taking Mary as the point of comparison, Sakura is pretty -- therefore, more pretty, prettier.

In comparison to Mary, going "from" Mary, Sakura is pretty.

And you notice here that we said just what that first sentence, "Meari yori Sakura-no hou-ga kirei da," was saying and we didn't need "hou".

It works perfectly well to say exactly the same thing without that "hou".

And we use "yori" in other contexts.

For example, we may say "Kotoshi-no fuyu-wa itsumo yori samui," which literally means "Comparing from always, this year's winter is cold" or "This year's winter is colder than always."

And what that actually means is "This year's winter is colder than usual, colder than most other years."

So that "always" is a kind of hyperbole, in a way.

Similarly, we can say "Sakura-wa hito yori kashikoi" -- "Sakura is clever compared to people."

And what that means, again, is "Sakura is clever compared to most people / Sakura is clever compared to people in general" -- in other words, is cleverer "than" the average person.

All right, so now let's look at "hou".

"Hou" is quite different.

It's not a particle, it's a noun.

That's why we have "no hou".

And its literal meaning is a "direction" or a "side".

And when we say "side", we mean "side" in the sense of "direction", not in the sense of "edge".

So, for example, if we talk about two sides of a field with "hou", we're not meaning the two edges of the field, we're meaning that we divide it approximately in half and we talk about "the left side" and "the right side" of the field.

Now, as we see from this analogy, one side always implies the other side.

And that's the important thing about "hou" in its metaphorical uses.

In its literal use, when I'm cycling in Japan, I might say to a stranger, pointing in the direction I'm going in, "Sore-wa Honmachi-no hou kou desu ka?"

And that's saying "Is that the direction of Honmachi?"

I'm not asking for street directions, which I can't understand in English, or Japanese, or any other language.

I'm asking for the literal direction: "Is Honmachi that way, or am I going in the opposite direction?" -- which I often am, because I am "hou kou onchi", which means I have no sense of direction.

So when we apply it metaphorically, we mean one thing or circumstance or whatever as opposed to another.

We can put it after a noun with -no, as we do with Sakura: "Sakura-no hou", or we can put it after a verb or an adjective, in which case that verb or adjective is describing the "hou", telling us what kind of a "hou" it is, which "side" it is.

So, if you say to me "Meari ga kirei da to omou?" -- "Do you think Mary is pretty?" -- and I reply "Sakura no hou-ga kirei da", I'm saying "The side of Sakura is pretty" -- in other words, I think Sakura is prettier.

Once again, it's a comparative construction, so I'm not saying Sakura is pretty and Mary isn't, but I am saying that the side of Sakura is prettier than the other side, which is Mary.

And, once again, let's notice that we don't need "yori" here.

"Sakura no hou ga kirei da" works perfectly happily on its own to mean exactly the same thing.

And a lot of the time you're going to see either "yori" or "no hou" on their own.

We do sometimes use the two together and when we're doing that we're either speaking fairly formally or we're really trying to underline the point of the difference and comparison between the two.

Another case in which we see "hou" is in the expression "ippou", which means "one side".

And we can see this often used in narrative, sometimes right at the beginning of a sentence -- not just a sentence, but a paragraph, and indeed a whole section of the story.

And what it's doing when we do this is it's saying essentially what we mean in English when we say "meanwhile".

But we shouldn't say that "ippou" means "meanwhile", because it doesn't.

"Meanwhile" is a time expression. It's saying "at the same time".

"Ippou", while performing the same function, does it quite differently.

What we say when we say "ippou" before going into something else, is really referring back to what we were talking about before, whatever that was.

And we're saying "All that was the one side; and now we're going to look at the other side."

It's like "demo", which wraps up whatever it was went before with "de" which is the te-form of "desu" -- "all that was, all that existed" -- "mo" gives us the contrasting conjunction: "demo" -- "but".

And we've talked about that in a different video lesson, haven't we?

"Ippou" should probably, strictly speaking, be "ippou de"; however, because it's a common expression, as is often the case with common expressions, we are allowed to drop that copula.

So, if we say that King Koopa (that's Bowser) was completing his preparations for the wedding ceremony with Princess Peach, and then we say "ippou" Mario's jumping up blocks on his way to rescue the princess.

So on the one side, that's what's happening with Bowser in Bowser Castle; on the other side, this is what's happening with Mario in the Mushroom Kingdom.

We can also use "ippou" as a conjunction.

And essentially this is working just the same way as the "ippou" which means "meanwhile".

It's taking one side, and then the other side, so it's a contrastive conjunction.

So we might say "kono atari-wa shizuka na ippou de fuben da" -- "It's quiet around here, but it's inconvenient / on the one hand, it's quiet around here, but it's inconvenient."

Literally that "kono atari-wa shizuka na" (which of course is "shizuka da" in its connective form).. "this area is quiet" -- and all that is a descriptor for "ippou": "shizuka na ippou".

"One side is that around here is quiet."

So, we're describing the one side, the "ippou de" and then "de", that's the copula --

"One side is that it's quiet, and the other side is..." (but we don't actually say "but the other side is", that's already implied) -- "One side is that it's quiet, it's inconvenient."

And that "ippou de" acts as the conjunction.

And we can, once again, leave off the copula here.

One other use of "ippou" that we should mention is that it can also be used after a complete verbal clause to show that something that is happening is continuing in one direction.

For example, we might say "kono mura-no jinkou-ga heru ippou da" -- "This village's population is just declining and declining / ... just goes on declining."

"Kono mura-no jinkou-ga heru" means "This village's population is declining" and the "ippou" is telling us that it just continues on in that one direction: it never grows, it never stays still, it just declines and declines.