いくら - when it doesn't mean 'how much'

[spurrymoses]

いくら　持っても　田中さんは　来ませんでした。

I was transcribing some Level 3 exams yesterday, and I had trouble translating this sentence (from the 1996 exam).

Shame on me, I know, - I'm meant to be studying for Level 2. Damn...
Nevertheless, I thought I'd post it here, because I came to the conclusion that anyone using EDICT/Wakan really should have difficulties with this sentence.

If you look up the word いくら in EDICT you will see only 2 definitions: how much?, how many?

And so, once again, I find myself asking my Japanese partner really stupid questions like: "So this means, 'Even though I wait how much, Mr. Tanaka, didn't come?'"

Very amusing, I'm sure. However, I soon realise that the meaning of いくら in this context, cannot possibly be either of these definitions. I don't even know if the final answer for this can be given in a one-word definition.

Hence, the final result was this:
No matter how long I waited, Mr. Tanaka didn't come.

I'm not quite sure whether I've taken too much liberty on that one - as I've made a fairly advanced English phrase. As far as I can tell, that's the general gist of this sentence. If I start using words like Despite waiting a long time I end up thinking, if that's what he was saying, he would have used different Japanese!

[Tim]

Your final result is correct.

I think you should not rely on English to Japanese or Japanese to English dictionaries when looking up meanings of words. All they do is give a subsitute word (often with an example sentence) in the other language which may not cover all it's uses.

You should now be looking into using a 国語辞典 to look up all of the words. Not only will this train you to become able to understand the explanations (in Japanese) of advanced words marked in the reading comprehension section, it will also describe all the uses of the particular word/phrase.

In this case, the meaning of how much, how many is used for how long.

[DancingHorses]

Hi,

I think I can add something here. In Japanese Verbs at a Glance by Naoko Chino, p. 123, there is a short blurb titled ikura ~te mo ... nai. Apparently, it is a set expression that translates into "No matter how much I did/do something...", and the result (final verb) must be negative.

You can get some practice with this structure by entering ちゅうい (注意) into WaKan and going through the example sentences. Several contain the phrase "you cannot be too careful", which is written like this :
いくら注意してもしすぎることはない。