Totemo, Sugoku, Kanari: How to Say Very in Japanese

The strength ladder at a glance

Think of degree words as a ladder with two labels on every rung: how strong it is, and who you can say it to. Most learner mistakes are register mistakes rather than strength mistakes. Saying chō omoshiroi to a section manager is not wrong about the strength, it is wrong about the room. The general adverbs guide covers frequency and manner words such as itsumo and yukkuri; everything here is about degree only.

Read the register column first. A safe working set for a beginner is chotto, kanari, totemo and hontō ni, because none of them will embarrass you in any situation. Add sugoku for friends and colleagues, hijō ni for written Japanese, and leave meccha and chō until you can hear which of your friends use them.

Chotto and sukoshi at the quiet end

Chotto and sukoshi both mean a little, but they are not interchangeable in tone. Sukoshi is the tidier, slightly more formal word and the one you want in writing or in careful speech; shōshō is its very polite service-industry cousin. Chotto is the spoken default and does two jobs at once: it measures a small amount, and it softens whatever comes next. That second job is why chotto muzukashii desu is usually a polite refusal rather than a comment on difficulty, and why staff say chotto omachi kudasai to make a wait sound short.

The comfortable middle: warito, kekkō and kanari

The middle of the ladder is where natural speech spends most of its time, and it is the part learners skip. Warito, and its stiffer relative wariai ni, mean comparatively or fairly: more than you might expect, but not remarkable. Kekkō sits a little higher and carries a flavour of pleasant surprise, so kekkō oishikatta means it was better than I assumed it would be. Kanari is the workhorse of the upper middle, meaning considerably, and it is safe in a meeting, an email or a chat with a neighbour.

Māmā deserves a warning. It looks like a middle intensifier but it functions as faint praise, roughly so-so, and answering māmā desu when someone asks how they cooked can land badly. Use it about your own performance, not about other people's.

Totemo, sugoku and hijō ni

These three are the same strength and different clothes. Totemo is neutral: it will never be wrong, in speech or in writing, with a friend or with a client. Sugoku is the spoken version most people actually use with colleagues and friends, and it is the adverb form of the adjective sugoi. Hijō ni means the same thing in a suit, so it belongs in reports, announcements and formal apologies, and it sounds oddly stiff in a chat about lunch.

Taihen is the other formal option and it is worth learning as a set rather than as a free adverb. Taihen mōshiwake gozaimasen and taihen osewa ni narimashita are fixed business phrases you will hear daily, and they are the versions to memorise whole. Building new sentences with taihen is possible but easy to get slightly wrong, so keep hijō ni for those and let taihen live inside the set phrases where it belongs.

Meccha, chō and the casual extreme

At the top of the spoken ladder sit monosugoku, meccha and chō. Monosugoku is emphatic but still respectable, so you can use it at work without anyone blinking. Meccha and chō are the young casual pair: meccha spread outward from western Japan and is now heard widely, and chō attaches directly to an adjective or even a noun. Both are for friends, and both sound strange in polite -masu speech, so if the rest of your sentence is formal, they will clash. Set phrases such as shinu hodo, meaning to the point of death, are stronger still and strictly casual.

One sentence at ten intensities

The fastest way to feel the ladder is to keep the sentence still and move only the degree word. Read this set from top to bottom aloud, and notice that the polite -masu frame stays the same until the last two rows, where the casual intensifiers pull the whole sentence into plain form.

Record yourself saying all twelve and play them back. If the strong ones do not sound stronger than the weak ones, the problem is not vocabulary, it is delivery, and the last section of this guide is the one you need.

Amari and zenzen need a negative

Two of the most useful degree words are grammatically incomplete on their own. Amari and zenzen set up a negative, and the sentence has to finish with -nai, -masen or a negative adjective ending. Learners regularly produce amari suki desu meaning I quite like it, which is not a sentence a Japanese speaker would say; the natural version is amari suki de wa arimasen, I do not like it very much. Anmari is the same word in relaxed pronunciation. Sonna ni and chittomo behave the same way, and metta ni does the frequency version of the job.

This pattern is also the polite way to be negative, which makes it more useful than its textbook position suggests. Amari oishiku nai desu is far softer than mazui desu, and amari yoku wakarimasen is gentler than wakarimasen on its own. Reaching for a negated intensifier lets you decline an invitation, criticise a plan or disagree with a colleague while keeping the sentence mild, which is exactly how such things are usually said in Japanese.

Zenzen with a positive, and what it signals

In casual modern speech, zenzen also appears in front of a positive word, where it means completely or not a problem at all. Zenzen daijōbu desu is the standard reassurance when someone apologises to you, and zenzen ii yo is its plain-form version among friends. Careful and written Japanese still expects the negative, and some older speakers dislike the positive use, so the safe rule is simple: use it as a warm reply in conversation and keep the negative pattern in anything formal.

Intensifying verbs, not just adjectives

Degree words attach naturally to adjectives, but verbs need a different set. Quantity takes takusan, frequency and thoroughness take yoku, and change over time takes zuibun or daibu. Zuibun marks something you have noticed and are slightly surprised by, while daibu describes a gradual improvement, which is why daibu yoku narimashita is the standard answer when someone asks how your cold is. Sugoku and hontō ni do work in front of verbs of feeling and change, such as tsukaremashita or tasukarimashita.

Totemo has one important verb use worth memorising: with a negative potential form it means there is no way. Totemo taberaremasen is not I very much cannot eat, it is I could not possibly finish this, and it is a graceful way to leave food or decline an unrealistic deadline.

Doubling, stretching and intonation

A great deal of Japanese emphasis is carried by sound rather than vocabulary, which is why a native speaker can sound more emphatic than you while using a weaker word. Three moves do most of the work. Repeat the word: hayaku hayaku, hontō ni hontō ni. Insert a small tsu to double a consonant: sugoku becomes suggoku, takai becomes takkai, atsui becomes attsui. Stretch the final vowel and let the pitch fall away over it: nagāi, ureshī. The doubled-consonant and stretched forms are casual and belong in speech, not in a report.

The fourth move is pure intonation. Say totemo oishii desu with a high, held first syllable on oishii and a wide fall, and it outperforms meccha oishii said flatly. This is where learners lose most of their emphasis, and it costs nothing to fix.

Choosing the right rung in real situations

• With a customer or a manager you do not know: kanari, totemo, taihen, hijō ni.
• With colleagues over lunch: kekkō, kanari, sugoku, monosugoku.
• With friends your own age: sugoku, meccha, chō, plus doubling and stretching.
• In an email or a report: sukoshi, kanari, totemo, hijō ni, and never chō.
• When declining or criticising: amari plus a negative, which softens the blow.
• When reassuring someone who has apologised: zenzen daijōbu desu.
• When you want sincerity rather than size: hontō ni, which says you mean it.