Caught Off Guard By Compound Verbs

When speaking Japanese, I’ve gotten used to not being able to catch what the speakers are saying, like being completely unable to parse what they are saying or missing crucial words to make sense of the utterance. That basically what the first few years of learning Japanese is, afterall. The response for that is usually straightforward: just ask the speaker to repeat what they said (no guarantees you would catch it the second time, though).

Misunderstanding what the speakers said, like simply mishearing the word or associating the correctly heard sounds to incorrect words (e.g. homophones), is also quite common. Usually you realized it mid-conversation and got some chance to fix the misunderstanding, or you realized it well after the conversation ended and you spend the rest of the day ruminating your inappropriate response.

But this is about that time when you can parse the utterance very well and you are able to associate each sound to the correct words but failed to understand the utterance. This often caught me off guard, and most of the time compound verbs are involved here.

One of those time is when I was looking for furniture in Nitori. I found something that I wanted to purchase but I didn’t see the item in the rack near the model item, so I went to ask the staff. I asked whether the item available, and they said that the item is currently お取り寄せ only. I knew 取る and I knew 寄せる but I could not guess what was お取り寄せ in this context. Can I buy the item or not? Do I need to do something to get the item?

Being very skilled in asking questions, I asked, “お取り寄せ？”, and the staff then proceeded to explain that there are currently no stock of the item in that particular branch shop and the item can only be sent after a certain date to the customer. The staff also told me that I just need to bring a small piece of paper—which I didn’t realize was there—that contained the item information to the cashier. While that at least gave me the information that I needed to make the purchase, it didn’t really tell me what “お取り寄せ” means here.

So before continuing my shopping, I tried to look it up on Jisho. As I usually do when looking up verbs on Jisho, I looked up the base form of it which is 取り寄せる. There was a hit, and the meaning does make sense in this context (i.e. to order; etc.) so I just went on with life then. But on different occassion, I looked up お取り寄せ in Jisho, and turned out it has a special entry for it. Fortunately, the meaning was not too far away.

Another such word is 手入れ. I often find it in labels on home appliances, but usually written more politely as お手入れ, which doesn’t have any entry in Jisho (at the time of writing, at least). Looking up 手入れる did return some relevant results but no entry for precisely “手入れる”. Now I usually also try different forms of the words when looking stuffs up in Jisho.

On more word that came up to mind is 洗い出す. I was confused when I first encountered that word, since the context it appeared was not related in any way with washing anything. The fact that verb stem + 出す form often means something happened or done abrubtly doesn’t help either. I encountered it when my superior gave me a task to do 洗い出す, whatever that means, to a certain topic, and he said that in a way that indicates that I need to report the result. Looking it up in Jisho gave some hint that I needed to do some kind of investigation, but it still too abstract to turn it into an actionable plan for me to execute.

After some more searching in the web, plus the context itself and my internal knowledge, I realized that I was expected to list up the important points from the topic. Turned out that the word itself means something like “removing dirt to reveal the surface behind it,” pretty much like what I imagine archeologists do when uncovering a buried fossil. Now I know that 洗い出す is often used figuratively as well.

I look forward to what other compound verbs are going to catch me off guard again in the future.