How can a friendly person be "hard to approach"? I have this phrase in my JLPT textbook: > {}{}{}{} My translation, which must be incorrect in some way, is, "my superior is hard to approach as he/she is friendly." It seems to me that `` implies some kind of connection or causality. It's not that the superior is friendly _and_ hard to approach, there is something about their friendliness that results in how it's hard to approach them. I'm reasonably sure about the definitions of individual words, but it seems to end up as an illogical assertion. How can someone who is friendly be hard to approach? What am I not understanding about this sentence?

I think you've more or less got the meaning of the words right. I would say {}{} means {} in this context (sense 2 in ). is similar to the figurative meaning of "get closer [to]" in English, so your literal translation works pretty well: "hard to approach".

Look at this definition for . In particular, it says {}[], which seems to directly contradict . The best translation probably depends on context, and there isn't much context to base a choice on, so I'll choose the first translation from the Kenkyusha J-E, which highlights the contradiction: "approachable".

So, we're trying to put these two meanings together:

* Hard to approach
* Approachable



I checked a number of dictionaries, but I couldn't figure out a way to make sense of this contradiction. So, based on comments from @Chocolate and others, as well as the seeming contradiction between the words, I believe:

**The sentence doesn't really make sense.** Sorry!