toranu tanuki no kawazan'yō lit. ‘counting the money for the pelts of raccoon dogs you haven’t caught’
Japanese idiom, everyday. Don’t count on a good result before it has actually happened.
Draft Not yet checked by a native Japanese speaker.
How do people use 捕らぬ狸の皮算用
?
An everyday proverb, said with a smile to someone spending a bonus they haven’t been paid yet. You can drop it in as a whole sentence or turn it into an action: “捕らぬ狸の皮算用をするな” (don’t count those pelts). The last word, 皮算用, also works alone for any premature calculation.
Also said 取らぬ狸の皮算用, とらぬ狸の皮算用
捕らぬ狸の皮算用
in real sentences
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捕らぬ狸の皮算用。
Toranu tanuki no kawazan'yō.
Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
Tatoeba, sentence by mookeee, translation by jakov, CC BY 2.0 FR
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捕らぬ狸の皮算用をするな。
Toranu tanuki no kawazan'yō o suru na.
Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched.
Tatoeba, sentence by small_snow, translation by blay_paul, CC BY 2.0 FR
Where does 捕らぬ狸の皮算用
come from?
Kotobank’s proverb dictionary explains the money: tanuki pelts went into the bellows of forges and the hair into writing brushes, so a caught tanuki was worth real cash, but the animal was hard to catch (it slips out through back tunnels when smoked out and plays dead at the sound of a gun). Because no example older than the end of the Edo period had turned up, the linguist Shinmura Izuru suggested it might be a Western-flavored rewording of the older 穴の貉を値段する. The same dictionary says a Meiji-era proverb collection later turned up a dialect form, 取らん狸の皮算用, which makes it close to certain the saying was already passed around by word of mouth in western Japan before that.
Mistakes learners make with 捕らぬ狸の皮算用
Reading 皮算用 as “kawasan’yō”. The s voices to z, so it’s kawazan’yō, as Wiktionary’s reading shows.
Other Japanese idioms like 捕らぬ狸の皮算用
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