Hi gang
I went down a little nuance rabbit hole and I didn’t see a thread about it so thought I’d share what I found, in case it’s helpful. I came across 大抵 which is translated in the dictionary as “mostly, ordinarily”. I got it confused with 大体 which is “generally, mostly”
It’s occurring to me that English definitions don’t always give me the best idea, so for the first time I decided to try reading about this kind of thing in Japanese. I was pleased to find this page which explained in pretty darn understandable Japanese some differences between the two.
For those who want to save a click/can’t parse the Japanese well, the examples give a dialogue about being asked if a report has been finished. It seems to indicate that it would be weird to use たいてい.
だいたい 書き終わりました。
“The report is almost (mostly, approximately) finished”
たいてい 書き終わりました。
It seems to have the nuance of “I am usually finished writing the report”
I can see how that sounds weird.
In contrast, if we’re trying to express “I almost always brush my teeth,” it would be just slightly stranger to say 大体:
B：私はだいたい 寝る前に歯を磨きます。
C：私はたいてい 寝る前に歯を磨きます。
DeepL seems to say that they have the same meaning, but the author indicates that there may be a tiny difference, saying that B is “uncomfortable”.
Their conclusion seems to be that だいたい is used in the majority of cases, but can sound strange when we’re talking about frequency.
I’m the type to want to know deep atomic-level nuance, so this kind of thing is interesting to me. Hope it helped someone. Have a nice day!