There are some Japanese words and phrases that don’t have a simple one word English translation, and vice-versa. For example, お疲れさまです、よろしくお願いします、爽やか、悩む、etc. The word that I’d like to talk about today is “困る” because this word comes up at least once or twice a day in my lessons.
In Japanese, the word 困る can be used in many situations. In English, you have to explain the situation and use a word or phrase that matches that particular situation. Often, my students say “He / She is troubled.” or “He / She is confused.”, and although I can kind of understand what they want to say, it’s not natural. If you look up 困る in a Japanese-English dictionary, you will get over 60 different results because it all depends on the situation.
Some commonly used phrases are:
- The person is in trouble
- The person is having trouble / difficulty
- The person doesn’t know what / how to (verb)
Now let’s look at some examples for the phrases above.
- The person is in trouble
- When I was driving on the highway, I saw a man on the side of the road with his car. His car had a flat tire. He seemed to be in trouble so I pulled over to help him.
- The person is having trouble / difficulty
- My coworker was having trouble / difficulty with the printer at work today, so I offered to help him.
- The person doesn’t know what / how to (verb)
- I need to get home but all of the trains have stopped because of the snow and I don’t know what to do.
- A tourist approached me in the train station and asked me questions in German. I don’t speak German so I couldn’t understand what he was saying and didn’t know how to help him.
If you have a question about a specific situation and want to know what to say, leave us a comment in English or Japanese and we’ll get back to you!