English
Library
図書館
としょかん
toshokan
| Japanese | Romaji | Register | When to use it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 図書館 としょかん |
toshokan | Neutral | A city, prefectural or university library. The building itself, and the default answer. |
| 図書室 としょしつ |
toshoshitsu | Neutral | The library room inside a school, hospital or company. A room, not a whole building. |
| ライブラリ ライブラリ |
raiburari | Written | Only the programming sense: a code library. Never a place you can walk into. |
Ask a passer-by in Tokyo where the raiburari is and you will get a puzzled look, because the katakana word never entered Japanese as a place with books in it.
toshokan is what you want nine times out of ten, and the kanji explain themselves: 図書 is books and 館 is a building, so it covers the city library, the prefectural library and the university library equally. Change that last character and the scale changes with it. 室 means room, so toshoshitsu is the library contained inside something larger, such as the one along the corridor at a junior high school or the reading room in a hospital. Japanese students almost always mean toshoshitsu when they talk about studying at the school library, and saying toshokan instead quietly implies they left campus to do it. The choice follows the actual architecture rather than who runs the place, so a school with a separate library building really does say toshokan. raiburari survives only in software, where programmers borrowed it for a code library, and that is where it has stayed.
Everyday use
駅の近くに図書館があります。
Eki no chikaku ni toshokan ga arimasu.
There is a library near the station.
Casual / Social Media
テスト前だから図書室にこもってる。
Tesuto mae dakara toshoshitsu ni komotteru.
Exams are coming, so I am holed up in the school library.
Formal / Cultural context
市立図書館で郷土の資料を閲覧しました。
Shiritsu toshokan de kyoudo no shiryou o etsuran shimashita.
I consulted local history materials at the city library.
The mistake that catches beginners most often is 本屋. It looks as though it should mean a house of books, but 屋 marks a shop, so a 本屋 is a bookstore where you pay at the counter. Trying to borrow there will not go well. The second trap is reaching for katakana. You will occasionally see ライブラリー on a cafe sign or in a shop name, but that is branding rather than the ordinary word, and if you are asking a stranger for directions toshokan is the form that will be understood immediately. Finally, do not let the 館 in toshokan mislead you into using it for every large public building. 美術館 is an art museum and 体育館 is a gymnasium; the kanji only tells you a building is involved, not which one.