How many grets before they start repeating?

千恨万悔
sen.kon.ban.kai

Literally: thousand – regret / resentment – ten thousand – regret / repentance

Alternately: Overwhelming feelings of regret about the past.

Notes: Some versions may not use 万, but rather the archaic form of the same character, 萬.

Both 千 and 万, instead of being taken literally, are used here to refer to large numbers or magnitudes; 千万 is a pretty common way of expressing something’s extreme nature. This plus the doubled synonymous kanji makes this into an emphasis-through-repetition type yojijukugo.

SenKonBanKai

I tried to read this series, then I regretted it deeply. (卍解 is read “bankai” here.)

About Confanity

I love the written word more than anything else I've had the chance to work with. I'm back in the States from Japan for grad school, but still studying Japanese with the hope of becoming a translator -- or writer, or even teacher -- as long as it's something language-related.
This entry was posted in Japanese, Yojijukugo and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s