め form of i-adjective in reviews?

Japanese
#1

Hey guys. Happy early christmas! :smiley:

I’m currently doing my reviews for the day but I got this odd i-adjective form in this sentence.

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I was trying to search for what this weird め-form was, but I could only really find maggie sensei talking about it (which I don’t like as grammar resource tbh…).

Any idea what it is? Is there any decent source I can read about this? From what I’ve gathered, it’s just a softer way of saying stuff? So, the way I’d expect this sentence to be written would be, なるべく早く練習してください which is more urgent/straightforward like ‘please call me quickly’, but なるべく早めに練習してください is more soft like ‘please call me kinda/somewhat quickly’?

Thanks guys for any help…

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#2

It basically means like “on the X-side”. For instance:

私: カレーを一つください。
店員: サイズはどうなさいますか。
私: 大め

Me: I’d like to have the curry please.
Clerk: What size should it be?
Me: On the bigger side of things.

Or maybe a better example is, when you ask for water and they ask how much ice you want in it. Then you can say like 少なめ, if you only want a bit in it.

I hope this helps you a bit.

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#3

Hi!

Thank you @AshuRage for your explanation. It would then be like the ‘-ish’ suffix in English, right?

It is in fact a na-adjective (also a noun, of course). I’ve done this search in Jisho, this め ‘suffix’ is quite useful!

HTH!

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#4

Yeah absolutely, ‘-ish’ would also fit the description.
However, since there are a lot of grammar points with a similar meaning to ‘-ish’ like っぽい、らしい、気、etc. I thought that “more on the X side of things” fits the meaning better. :slight_smile:

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#5

Yes. め specifies that something possesses not just a certain quality of an adjective, but also a certain quantity of said quality, right?

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#6

I think it implies, that it does not have much of a certain quality. But if you’d have to say whether or not it has the quality X or the polar opposite, you’d judge it to have that quality. Does that make sense?

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