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かわいそうに思いました

Is this an exception or an expression. This basically means「かわいそうだと思いました」right? Normally with に it would be an adverb, but in this situation it's what he thinks. Can someone explain how that form works?

Simon
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  • I'll refrain from posting this as an answer since I'm not fully confident about this, but my sense is that かわいそうだと思う and かわいそうにおもう are not saying the same thing. The first seems more like one is saying "I think it's miserable/pitiful"; the later seems to be saying "I feel sorry about something" as in かれをかわいそうにおもう -> I feel sorry for him. – A.Ellett Sep 05 '21 at 14:36
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    Perhaps this https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/72511/uses-of-%E3%81%AB%E6%80%9D%E3%81%86-in-this-statement might help you. – Nameless Sep 05 '21 at 14:48
  • @A.Ellett Yes this is what it means, but since it's used as an adverb I would expect the translation to be "thinking pitifully" which doesn't make sense. I'm looking for an explanation of this pattern, maybe it's just an expression. – Simon Sep 05 '21 at 19:50
  • @Simon かわいそうに is an expression I think. Check here https://jisho.org/search/%E3%81%8B%E3%82%8F%E3%81%84%E3%81%9D%E3%81%86 – Nameless Sep 05 '21 at 19:59
  • @Nameless I found the answer, the question you linked was good, but the answer he gave was bad in my opinion. There was another question linked where Naruto explain the usage of adverbs which can differ from english adverbs. Thanks for helping! – Simon Sep 05 '21 at 20:02
  • @Simon If so, care to post an answer? – Nameless Sep 05 '21 at 20:04
  • @Nameless I marked the question as duplicate and linked the answer, check it out, let me know if you need more details :) – Simon Sep 05 '21 at 20:06
  • Simon, I'm not sure why just because something is used as an adverb in one language, you would expect the same grammatical structure in another (particularly when the languages are as different as English and Japanese). Keep in mind that the notion of adverb is something developed to help explain Indo-European grammatical structures--and it doesn't always work well there either (particularly if you start to look at languages like Sanskrit). – A.Ellett Sep 05 '21 at 21:46
  • @A.Ellett This has nothing to do about being different languages, this is about coherence. Everywhere else adverbs work as I would've expected (in Japanese), but not in this particular case, which makes it an exceptional use of the adverbs, which is rather incoherent in my opinion (and it's okay, every languages have some incoherences here and there). Naruto gave examples, with the exact same structure that works like every other adverbs: 痛切に感じる for example, so it is very natural as a learner to expect that it would work like that all the time. – Simon Sep 05 '21 at 22:02

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