日進月歩

にっしん　げっぽ
nisshin geppo

I've been dealing with the frustrations of trying to figure out WHY certain things don't sound correct in Japanese, or when to use a certain construction over another that means the exact same thing with a slightly different nuance (as is evidenced by the 2kyuu grammar sections below), and recently the inquiries I've made of Japanese people have revealed that many of them don't really know the answers. Just like I can't precisely explain why I use "which" instead of "that" sometimes, they use their language without thinking about why they do it. And a lot of the grammar and constructions I'm learning for 2kyuu are old enough to be rendered unimportant in terms of modern, daily-use speech patterns. Aggravating as all of this can be, it does yield some interesting conversations, and the first opportunity for me to use the above Yo-ji.

The Kanji are familiar ones, right? Day, Move Forward, Month, Walk? The first time I heard it, I managed to leave with the impression that it meant "Step by step," which could not be farther from the truth.

Definition:
日ごと月ごとに進歩する。
Translations:
1: Progress by leaps and bounds
2: Rapid advances.
3. (description of) A world in which something changes, something is different every day, in a forward moving way.



例文： 言葉は本当に生き物だ。僕が日本語を習った時、「ぜんぜん」と「大丈夫」を一緒に使っては絶対いけませんだった。だが、今、皆が「ぜんぜん大丈夫」と言うよね？それは日本語という言葉の日進月歩かな？
Languages are living things. When I learned Japanese, it was absolutely forbidden to use "zenzen" in conjunction with a word like "daijoubu." But nowadays, everybody says it!　I guess that's the alleged progress of this language that we call "Nihongo."

The video above is an appropriate one: 35 years of Shinjuku!