During review today, Bunpro prompted me with:
この道はとても__ので、車は通れません。
This road is so narrow that cars cannot pass through.
The answer is 細い
But gosh, I really wanted it to be 狭い, because it relates to space being narrow.
Can a native speaker or expert please help me get what I’m missing?
I’m not by any means an expert, but image search suggests both can refer to a road too narrow for a car:
me no expert either but my intuiton says: 狭い for car roof clearance, 細い for wheels width.
Not an expert but I think what you’re missing is that languages don’t map 1 to 1 onto each other and a word like 狭い might mean narrow but that doesn’t mean it will match every use case of the English word narrow. A good example of this is the word close. 近い means close, right? But in English, the word close has so many meanings, and 近い can’t cover all of them. For example, “that was close!” isn’t 近かった but 惜しかった. The same thing applies in the reverse. Words have various meanings and usages that just can’t map onto each other 1 to 1 so sometimes the appropriate word isn’t what you’d intuitively reach for if you were just doing a 1 to 1 translation.