First opened Saturday, January 14, 2023
片言
かたこと
- flat (heiban)
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
broken (in reference to speaking style, e.g., Japanese)
Taken apart
We don't have the data for this section. Wiktionary has no Etymology section for this reading, and a split made without one would be a guess.
In a sentence
そのアメリカ人の男の子は片言の日本語を話した。
The American boy spoke broken Japanese.
僕の片言の英語がなんとか通じたのでほっとしました。
I was relieved that I could make my broken English understood.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Wiktionary dump has no Etymology section for this reading, so nothing is said about where the word comes from.
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.