I got into the habit of using kanari and my teacher told me it sounds a bit formal, and in casual situations it’s better to use nakanaka.

I’ve never had a problem with “totemo” — if you want an analogy, I learned to speak Japanese purely by actually listening and speaking, as opposed to hitting the books or taking classes. I guess that’s analogous to learning how to play an instrument by practicing alone to records and then actually putting the practice into action by playing in bands, as opposed to going to music school and learning to read.

So, I suppose I learned Japanese by “negative usage” — meaning, that if I didn’t actually hear an expression used very much by the people around me, I would tend not to use it myself, and the same with the opposite — if I heard an expression a lot, I would tend to use that instead of the “book-learning” equivalent.

As an example, I was very puzzled when Japanese people used “sugoi” as an adjective but didn’t change it to “sugoku,” which would be the “proper” way to say it. In other words, I’d hear “sugoi yasui” instead of “sugoku yasui” a LOT — and since that’s grammatically not correct, I would ask my friends why they didn’t use “sugoku” instead of “sugoi.” I mean, technically speaking, it’s just plain wrong. It would maybe have an equivalent in English (in certain circles) of using “hell of” as an adjective — maybe that’s just California slang, but lots of people used to use the expression as in, “That’s hell of cheap,” which of course, is so off-the-charts grammatically incorrect that it verges on absurdity.

But I simply did not hear “totemo” used a lot in Ōsaka, where I pretty much learned Japanese from scratch, with no school, classes or computers (this was before the Internet).

I’d hear “sugoi” a lot instead of “totemo” but I would also hear “sonna ni” a lot more than “kanari” — as in, “sonna ni takakunai” (not that expensive) instead of “kanari yasui” (fairly cheap). And when “kanari” normally should be used, I’d hear “kekko” used a lot more often. as in, “kekko yasui ya de,” (Ōsaka-ben for “pretty cheap, dude”) instead of “kanari.”

There are tons of ways to say “fairly,” “quite” or other modifying adjectives in that vein, but in my circles I would hear “sugoi” and “meccha” (with the little “tsu”) to express superlatives.

Thus, I think I must put my brain into it and really learn how to use words like “kanari” and “zuibun” instead of “sugoi” and “taihen” . . . I’m just a product of my education, after all, and most of that was from females and young people, and above all, my beloved Ōsaka-ben.

Maa, ii ka. Ore ni totte, motto yoku tsukau hyōgen no hō ga oboeyasui to omou’n yakedo sa . . .

“Dei~ji”

今日はデイージ暑いだね！

Thank you for the useful article!