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Why JLPT N1 learners mix up 見すぼらしい (みすぼらしい, “shabby; seedy”) and 浅ましい (あさましい, “wretched; miserable; shameful; mean; despicable; abject”).
Both describe a wretched or miserable state. The visual shabbiness of 見すぼらしい overlaps with the moral or situational meanness of 浅ましい, making them highly confusable when describing a person's low condition.
On JLPT N1, this pair shows up as a vocabulary meaning question. You see one word and pick its English equivalent from four options — one of which will be the other word in this pair, chosen as a distractor precisely because of the overlap.
Reading the explanation is step one. Targeted practice is what actually moves a confusion pair out of your weak list. Free, no signup needed to try.
Practice N1 confusion pairsSpot a mistake in this explanation? Email us. Explanations are AI-generated and human-reviewed; corrections welcome.