どう a deer, a female deer

[jrmr50]

どう… I just can’t get my head around this word that appears everywhere in Japanese. I’m ever really sure how to translate it when I’m reading.

どうだろう was the latest incarnation

どういう
どうしても
どうしよう

Is it better to take each occurance of どう on its own merits or seek to unravel the mysteries of どう in its entirity.

How happy I’ll be if I can understand this one day:

Looked for a video on どう on youtube, got a million hits on どう. Search results for どう grammar mainly gave どういう vids.

Any tips, ideas, links to help me unlock this mental block I have with どう。

[Sidgr]

Are you familiar in general with the
あ・か・さ・ど cycle?
あれ、これ、それ、どれ
おそこ、ここ、そこ、どこ

どう fits in just the same.

あ*、こう、そう、どう
*There is not really an あ but ああいう is close.

こう言う、どう言う
そうしよう、どうしよう

I think as long as you have an intuition about そう, どう is just the question form of it.

[phnorobp]

I usually just think of どう as meaning something like “how” or “in what way” and use those words in a broader sense than just the literal translation.

I would for example think of どうしよう as something like literally “how should we do?” … then improve the translation as “how should we act?” … leading to “what should we do?”.

And どうしても as literally “how even we do” (も adding the even) … “how ever we do” … “whatever we do” … “in any case”.

[Asher]

こ words - I know
そ words - You know
あ words - We know
ど words - Who knows?

Pretty much all of the constructions of the こ, そ, あ, ど words can be summed up this way. どう is the verb equivalent. It asks ‘how’, regardless of what is attached to it. Maybe just remember the う part as having something to do with verbs? (That’s not literally what it means but if pretending that helps you remember, why not?)

[Sidgr]

@Asher

あ words - We know

Hmm, is is this best way to think of it?
I think of it in terms of psychological locality.

こ - close me
そ - close to you
あ - close to neither of us
ど - unknown

[Asher]

A better way to think of it than ‘we know’ is-

こ - In my space
そ - In your space
あ - In our space
ど - In whose space?

あ is not quite ‘close to neither of us’, it’s more ‘that place we both see/know’. It’s a symbolizer of shared knowledge, while ど is the symbolizer of lack of knowledge. That’s how I lump them into groups in any case.

[Sidgr]

I have to think about this.

[jrmr50]

どうだろう - probably whose space? how right? probably how…

help me with this one

[Asher]

‘I wonder how’

[Jose7822]

どう can be “What”, depending on the context. For example:

どうしよう？ What should I (we) do?

So I feel your pain. Out of all the こ、そ、あ、ど words , どう is the hardest IMO.

[jrmr50]

One explanation was that it’s between ‘how’ and ‘what’ and there’s not really a direct translation into English.
That it’s a question word for an undefined action.

[Asher]

English is the one to blame for being too complex. Japanese is doing you a favor by putting all the question words in one .

[jrmr50]

A bit like the versatility of the f-word in English, noun, adjective, adverb and verb all in one expletive

[Jose7822]

Except Japanese has the same thing going with やばい！lol

[jrmr50]

Putting it all together: どうやばい？

[Jose7822]

Pretty much!

[jrmr50]

[phnorobp]

You’re of course right with the “what”.

But I think this comes with translating する as “do”, which is the usual and normal translation.

But if you were the use the word “(re)act” instead of “do”, then you would use “how” instead of “what” in English as well.

I think this どうしよう often comes up in situations where one could ask “What should we do?” as well as “How should we react?”.

[SteveB]

After all this time, this was definitely a question I’ve been too embarrassed to ask at this point . Its one of those things that seems or ‘should’ be so simple, but whenever I think I have it, I get confused again with how its used in a new sentence.
Its interesting @jrmr50 that we seem to be a similar level and study time and you are having the same issue!

[Rukifellth]

Every time I use どうして or the variants I always seem to either have it in the wrong spot or say it in a very confusing way. so this particular grammar point I have a might sore spot for.