The road to JLPT #3 - 本日の文法

Hello everyone, and welcome to our daily JLPT thread! It’s insane seeing the community grow up to 20 users. I want to keep these posts up in hopes of building an active community that focuses on what the Japanese language is, and how it works. It really is a fascinating subject to study!

本日の文法：JLPTN4の「～くらい/ぐらい」

～くらい/ぐらい Is a single word that is most commonly found when talking about approximations or approximate values. Keep in mind that both くらい and ぐらい are the same and 100% interchangeable, so it’s up to personal preference you how say and spell it. This word has a few more uses that may be more idiomatic and make your Japanese sound more natural as well, so let’s look at some examples.

A few example sentences for this could be

明日のテストは30分ぐらいかかります。”Tomorrow’s test will be about 30 minutes long.”

彼女の息子は前回会った時、身長がもう120センチぐらいだったよ！”Last time I saw her son, he was already around 120cm tall!”

Although this form is rather casual, and for more formal speech you would use other forms, it is still extremely common, and you can find it in a lot of places, from media, to casual speech and even advertising. This isn’t even the only casual way to mark approximate values, but I think it might be the best to learn first, as it’s both versatile enough, and quite useful to know.

Now, some uses of ぐらい may be a bit confusing for a student at first. This is because a second common use for the word is as a level indicator. That means, as a word you use to emphasise the degree of things.

Let me show you a few examples

こんな簡単な文章ぐらい、小学生でも読める。”Even a grade schooler could read a text as simple as this”

And for a more complex one, if you want to challenge yourself:

お寿司は世界中の何百万人も食べたことがあるぐらい有名な和食です “Sushi is a Japanese dish so popular that millions of people around the world have tried it”

In both of those sentences くらい is used to indicate the degree of situations. In the first case it indicates just how simple a text is (simple enough for a grade schooler), while in the second case it indicates how famous sushi is (famous enough to have been eaten by millions around the world). I understand this specific use may be a bit more challenging, so feel free to create your own examples to practice and play around with it as you get more comfortable! Remember that writing and speaking are important parts of learning a language as well.

That would be all for today, hope everybody has a very nice day!