It is also readily available in many groceries and supermarkets in these areas. Machaca Spanish: ⓘ is a traditionally dried meat, usually spiced beef or pork, that is rehydrated and then used in popular local cuisine in Northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States. (Note: featured image of girls in a classroom taken from Pexels.Pork machaca, eggs and potatoes wrapped in a tortilla, served with guacamole A more formal-sound word like “considerably”, on the other hand, probably wouldn’t be appropriate. In the above two examples, I have used “crazy” and “super”, words that are somewhat casual/informal. For the adjectival form you would use “sugoi” (ex: “sugoi hito”)įinally, from a translation point of view it is best to try and incorporate the slang nuance into the English word choice. It’s generally safer to use “sugoku” as a default, though keep in mind this is the adverb form. I won’t go into too much detail here, but I will say that some consider Kansai and Tokyo to have very different cultures.īecause of the above reasons, I personally stay away from using “meccha” unless I am extremely comfortable with the group I am in. The second point is that, discussions of language evolution aside, some people probably still consider this is a Kansai term, and that carries with it certain cultural nuances. Even among youths, I feel there are some people who would use this term rarely, if at all (perhaps those who consider themselves more cultured). Having said that, I have heard natives use “meccha” while speaking with polite language, but I don’t recommend emulating that. Therefore, I wouldn’t consider it appropriate to use with anyone who you would use the desu/masu form with (like your boss or senpai). First, this word is still primarily used by younger speakers (I’d say below 30, but that’s a guess) and should be considered an informal slang term. There are two important takeaways from this. However, in the last decade or two this word has spread to other regions (probably due to media influences), and nowadays seems to be commonly used by some Tokyo youths. There’s more to the story though: “meccha” was originally a word primarily used among youths in Kansai dialect (関西弁). But “meccha” itself is primarily used to mean “to a great extent”. Besides meaning “to an great extent”, all these words can be used to mean “unreasonable” or “chaotic” (with the longer two words having a more emphatic feel). “Meccha” comes from “mecha”––I’m talking about Japanese here, not the English loanword about giant robots––and these in turn come from the words “mechakucha” and “mechamecha” (I’m not sure which was first historically). Now I’d like to talk about the origin of this word, since it affects the nuance. This goes the same for “meccha”, for example: You may recall that adverbs can modify not only adjectives (“oishii” is an adjective), but also verbs. Other Japanese words that can be used in a similar way include すごく (sugoku), 非常に (hijou ni) and とても(totemo). It is generally used as an adverb to mean “to a great extent” or “extremely”. The meaning of めっちゃ is pretty straightforward and quite easy to use. The English word “mecha” sounds more like “meka” (メカ), whereas the Japanese word “meccha” sounds like “me-cha”, where there is a pause between the syllables and the “cha” sounds like it does in the phrase “cha-cha-cha”. Because it resembles the English word “mecha” (a loan word referring to giant robots) you may think “meccha” is similar, but in fact the sound of the “cha” is different. In this post I’ll go over the explicit meaning first, then give some more information about the history and nuances of the word.įirst, I wanted to clarify the pronunciation for this word. “Meccha” (generally written in hiragana as めっちゃ, though occasionally in katakana as メッチャ) is one such word. When learning a foreign language it is good to understand both, and sometimes there is much more to the nuance than the explicit meaning. Words generally have an explicit meaning (what it says in the dictionary) in addition to an implicit meaning, also called the nuance or atmosphere of the word.
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