29862
I was talking to one of my friends, and at one point they said

> ドイツ雪ってるはず

Am I right in thinking that 雪ってる means snowing?

I'm aware this is clearly not formal Japanese at the very least, but I've also
never seen it used before at all. Can 雪(る) even be used as a verb?
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2015-12-14T18:41:20.377
29856
2015-12-15T18:10:17.713
9185
question
translation words slang
Meaning and validity of 雪ってる
As you guessed, it surely is "It must be snowing in Germany", said in a very
slangy way.

People usually don't use 雪る, but [coining such
verbs](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/24351/5010) (even from traditional
Japanese words) is not too uncommon among native speakers. You know, English
speakers do it pretty often in casual settings, too. And in this case, there's
a verb 曇【くも】る (雲 + る, "cloudy") which looks similar, so it should have been
easy for them to come up with 雪る.

Of course, don't try to use it yourself until you reach the native speaker's
level, or people would just think you made a grammatical mistake.
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2015-12-15T03:02:32.940
29862
2015-12-15T03:02:32.940
2017-04-13T12:43:44.260
-1
5010
29856
answer
**If the speaker really said 雪ってる** , then yes, I agree with you and naruto
that it should be a made-up word meaning “snowing.” But I have another
explanation of what happened, which I think is much more likely given your
description.

Just from your description, it is entirely possible that the speaker said
雪[降]{ふ}ってるはず and you heard it as 雪ってるはず. For example, when I tried pronouncing
雪降ってるはず, I found myself [devoicing the
vowel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Devoicing) in the ふ
sound. Some non-native speakers have trouble recognizing devoiced vowels.
Moreover, this particular case of devoiced vowel is probably more difficult to
recognize than typical devoiced vowels because it is followed by っ and
therefore the lack of vowel sound can be mistakenly attributed to the
following っ.
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2015-12-15T18:10:17.713
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2015-12-15T18:10:17.713
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