Severe, terrible cruel...
How do you say hidoi in English?

Recently  a student and I were talking about the Athens Olympics.  One of the things we spoke about was the incident that happened 7 kilometers before the end of the men's marathon.

If you watched the marathon, you may remember that Venderlei de Lima from Brazil took the lead after 20 kilometers. When de Lima was near the 35 kilometer mark, a man wearing strange clothes rushed out from the crowd and attacked him. De Lima was startled but he was able to continue the race. Unfortunately, however, he lost the lead and ended up with a bronze medal.

I asked my student what she thought about the incident and she said something like, "I think it was very... er... hidoi... er how do you say hidoi in English?"

How do you say hidoi in English? Good question. Let's talk about it in the next section.

Hidoi in English


Hidoi is not an easy word to translate into English. The problem is that, as with many adjectives, there isn't one English adjective that can be translated as hidoi in every situation.


If I look up hidoi in my Japanese-English dictionary, I find 7 possible translations:


  heavy, severe, bitter, serious, terrible, cruel, bad.


Knowing which one to choose is not easy. For example, my dictionary translates hidoi ame （ひどい雨） as heavy rain; hidoi samusa （ひどい寒さ） is translated as severe cold (bitter cold would also be possible). In both cases, terrible would also be possible.


As you can see, to translate hidoi accurately, you really need to think about what hidoi is describing. In other words, what would be an appropriate adjective-noun collocation?
Try the short exercise in the next section and then click the link below it to see my suggestions and comments.

Exercise


Here are some more examples from the same dictionary. How do you think hidoi (or hidoku) was translated  in these cases?

1.  hidoi atsusa （ひどい暑さ）
2.  hidoi me ni au （ひどい目に遭う）　
3.  hidoi shiuchi　（ひどい仕打ち）　
4.  hidoi kaze　　（ひどい風邪）
5.  hidoku shikarareru　（ひどくしかられる）
6.  hidoku shukketsu suru　（ひどく出血する）
7.  hidoku kane ni komatte iru （ひどく金に困っている）

When you've finished the exercise, please click on the link below:
Suggested answers and comments

Click here if you want to try some of my other one-point lessons.

© Robert E. Jones, 2004