After I made a speech (not in Japanese) a friend told me 「発表頑張り過ぎた」. I am
struggling with this sentence and I cannot determine whether it is positive or
negative. The way I spontaneously interpret it is:

> For this speech, you did your best too much.

Which, of course, does not make any kind of sense. Was he trying to warn me
that I _tried too much_ , that the speech was not so good, not natural enough,
etc.? Or is it just a simple _well done_ -type of thing?

I would be interested in knowing the real meaning of this expression. (This is
not a question about how to use 過ぎる grammatically speaking.)
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2017-08-10T15:51:06.077
52185
2017-08-10T22:39:37.560
question
meaning words
Meaning of 頑張りすぎた
I'm not native, but from my experience, 頑張り is pretty much always positive. I
would think it means something like, "You did very well on this speech," so
yes, just a simple well done, as you said. 過ぎる can just mean over, not
necessarily "too much;" perhaps "You gave 110% on this" - you did more than
your best - would be a closer translation. Again, I'm not native, so I hope
someone else comes along to help you, but that's just my take on things.
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2017-08-10T16:55:44.393
52187
2017-08-10T16:55:44.393
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answer
I'm not a native speaker but will give my best shot at this one.

I think in this case a good translation which carries the nuance of the
original statement is:

> You really overdid the presentation!

I feel this can be interpreted in either a positive way (you did awesome!) or
negative way (you did more than you really needed to!). I think you can only
tell which from the context, which includes the intonation/expression of the
person speaking this, and how hard you really did try.

If I didn't have any extra context, I would interpret this as meaning "you did
a great job, but you did more than you really had to".
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2017-08-10T22:39:37.560
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2017-08-10T22:39:37.560
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answer