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I've always thought that they both mean something like "I see" or "Is that
so?" and I was told that they have different meaning. Is that so?
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2014-05-03T11:01:54.627
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2014-05-03T17:08:00.147
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word-choice translation usage
What's the difference between そうかな and そうなんだ?
There is a difference between the two and it is the kind of difference that
could easily be lost in translation.

You say 「そうなんだ」 when you basically have no doubt about what you have just
heard from the other person. You have learned something new and you are
chiming in with him.

「そうかな」 is different in that you have an amount of doubt about what you have
just heard. You may have a different opinion regarding the matter.

This is why using a translation like "Is that so?" in understanding the two
Japanese phrases in question might not help greatly because it could be used
in both situations, could it not?
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2014-05-03T15:38:16.070
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I think that そうかな corresponds (loosely) to "Oh, really?" or "Is that so?" or
"Oh, you think so?", and そうなんだ to "I see" (as you might expect: the former is
a question, the latter a statement, both in Japanese and in English).

な is a variant of ね, here in particular with the feel of asking _yourself_ a
rhetorical question. I wouldn't go as far as saying that you are doubting the
statement, but you _wouldn't be surprised, if it were false_.

_Note_. In Japanese, そうかな (and そうですか) may also be used in a context, where in
English you'd simply say "I don't think so".

P.S. そうなの? is a way of saying "Is that so?", which preserves the ambiguity of
whether you might be doubting the statement or just accepting it "as is".
CC BY-SA 3.0
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