A couple of questions
 

Hi all and thanx from now for your help. I would like to ask a couple of questions.

1_ I know すみません　and ごめんなさい to say sorry. But how do I say "I am sorry to hear that you are sick/lost your job...and so on" or "I am sorry for your headache/bad health/loss of money...and so on". Basically a sorry which is not an apology, but expresses one's own sympathy feelings.

2_ I was always told (and found in exercises) that to say like/dislike we use the adjectives 好き・嫌い and learnt how to make their construct (basically the liked/disliked item is the subject). Going around my dictionary I have found one verb, and out of curiosity I checked also a second one, and found out that there are also verbs for like/dislike. Since I have never seen used 好く・嫌う, I was wondering if they are not used (I don't know, maybe obsolete?) or they are used by Japanese speakers. And also, do they have the same construction of the adjectives or they use the item liked/disliked as object (thus using を)?

私はあなたに頭痛がすみません思っている。
watashi wa anata ni zutsuu ga Sumimasen omotte iru .

For "I am sorry you have a headache." I think.

I think not. Let's hear what a native speaker has to say

If I may be honest, that sentence is SO wrong that I don't even know where to start correcting it. :confused:

That is the problem when you try help others by using an online translator. And you can't even verify the answers if it is correct or wrong.

It's either you know it, or you don't.

I think exact expression sometimes are not appropriate. Here you rarely say you are sorry for other is sick. Instead you wish quick recovery; which has both expressions of your sorry feelings and good wishes. Odaizini
Or you show your sympathy; taihen desu ne.

Separating empathy and apology can be difficult in Japanese. Hell, it would sound weird to say "I empathize with you," even in English. We say "I'm sorry" too, don't we? ;) Like Taro said, taihen desu ne (that's terrible, that's too bad) is a good expression and the "ne" makes it sound less like a commentary and more like empathy.

Then again, I confused the hell out of my girlfriend when she said "I'm so sorry" and I said "It's not your fault" :D

The words you had in question 2 might be archaic, I've never heard/used them

Sometimes, certain expressions in a particular language do not translate well in another language. Here, expressing sorry in a sympathetic manner is quite difficult to express them out in Japanese; for a simple reason that Japanese don't say it that way. They have their own peculiar way of expression in such situation.

Beside, taihen desu ne (given above as example), they may say,気の毒 as in:
- (お)気の毒ですね。
- お気の毒に存じます。

Yeah, as Keaton said in the second point, they're probably used in ancient times but not now. I, myself, have not seen them being used like that before.

Thanx for you replies. So if I well understood Japanese people don't say "sorry for", but they rather say "it is a pity" or "it is terrible that something happened."
Thanx again.

嫌う still survives.
彼はあの人を嫌っている。
彼に嫌われた。
猫の嫌う匂い。
It's commonly used, but I rarely say "彼を嫌う", "納豆を嫌う". I can't find the right words to explain. but maybe, 嫌う is used as a an ad-noun or with a conjugated form.
As Keaton and Enyafriend said, 好く is obsolete. but the negative form "好かん、好かない" are sometimes used especially in a dialect. well this is quite unnecessary to add.^^

Who said you had to? :)

Anyways, why not just give a suggestion instead of only commenting on how bad the Heru's guess was. I'm sure everyone will produce sentences that are wildly incorrect when learning any language.

I don't mean to seem hostile but I never see the point in bashing someone actually trying to help.

It's alright if you make a grammatical error when trying to help someone. Someone would surely say "Hey, you made a mistake there"

But when you pass off crap you probably learned from an anime theme song as information, it's bad for the learner. People come to this place to learn facts, not hearsay. If you're that much of a learner, stick to reading threads and making questions, not answering them. :mtongue:

From what I have seen on JF, whenever someone puts "I think" in their answer, 95% of the time the Japanese is wrong.

After a while in the forum people start knowing who to trust and whose message don't even read. I developed an instinct to go read the location of the person answering and if it doesn't say Japan I go read the name coz I got to trust very few names in here that don't live in Japan, but showed to know what they are talking about.
I too sometimes try to guess a phrase when people ask...but I make sure that it is well written that the phrase is almost certainly wrong because made by a beginner. It is more a way to test myself than trying to help someone. And if it is not completely wrong, but just some small "imperfection" it can also start a discussion which can be very useful to beginners like me.