こちら そちら あちら

[yankumi]

I have a book -- "Different Games Different Rules"--that briefly mentions that こちら　そちら　and　あちら are direction pronouns that can be used for literal pronouns. Japanese For Busy People does use こちら　for "this person", is it ever used for I or we as the Different Games book states? The book also states そちら can be either csingular or plural "you" and あちら can be used for "he" "she" or "they". I am finding nothing online to back this up

[mandolin]

I'd never heard of it either.

But in talking with a native speaker, he used kochira and sochira all the time as pronouns. Coco-san also confirmed it when I asked this exact same question in another thread somewhere. (this forum needs a search function. )


Anyway... yeah. Very common usage.

EDIT: I went ahead and searched through the pages of threads to find it.
Here

[yankumi]

thank you! The forum does have a search function, but I always forget about it when I have a question.

Coco noted that you might find uses of kochi in manga, a friend of mine who lived in Japan for several years said you could also use kochi when talking to children.

[mandolin]

huh.. I never noticed it had a search function. I found my old post by browsing page by page... hehe

[Harisenbon]

. . . There's a search function?

...

Holy crap! There is! That's awesome! Now I feel stupid for spending 20 minutes searching for old posts by hand. :/

[Kisshu]

hey... I have a question then.. is こちら only used for people? I saw it on somebody's webpage describing their art gallery... was it used incorrectly?

[zengargoyle]

yeah,
there's a search link on the left. but i think it only searches the
Subject lines of the postst. it might be nice to make it more prominent
like having a Search Panel or something.

maybe somebody can answer me this: how do search functions work on
Japanese sites? in English we have words break on spaces and the words
can then be indexed nicely. in Japanese, it would be easy to index on
kanji, and maybe even kanji compounds, but i don't see how they index
the kana texts without spaces to mark out words. maybe they parse the
whole thing into words before indexing but that seems hard to do.