Hello
What does ( kinda ) mean ?
I need it in a useful sentence please.
Thanks a lot
Mohammad
It has no intrinsic meaning and is not a word; it is a written transcription of the way many native speakers pronounce ‘kind of’. It should be used only when writing direct quotes of casual English.
Aha! Thanks MM
But could you provide me with one or two clear sentences ?
Thanks again!
The punk shouted at me, “I kinda don’t like yer stoopid face, dude!”
‘Kinda’ (kind of) often turns up in informal conversation as a way of making a verb or adjective more tentative. It may minimize (lessen the degree of) an idea or soften a negative idea:
-
I kinda like this car. I’m just not sure I like it enough to buy it.
-
I like this car but it’s kinda expensive. (It might be too expensive for me to buy.)
-
It was kinda nasty to say that to her. I kinda get the feeling you’d say anything just to make her feel bad.
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[size=75]“I don’t have to wait until the next morning to regret something I did that was kinda dumb.” ~ Bobby Knight[/size]
Hello,
I was thinking of a couple of sentences using ‘kinda’ when I first read Mohammadata’s question (at that time, neither of you
had replied yet) and I got confused with the tenses in this one:
I kinda regret getting drunk and dancing on the table last night.
I kinda regret having gotten drunk and dancing on the table last night.
I kinda regret having gotten drunk and having danced on the table last night.
Thank you
I’d like to go back to the original question and reinforce that ‘kinda’ is not a word, and particularly in a set of sentences like yours, Cristina, where a fine grammar point is being examined and the text is not obviously a transliteration of casual spoken English, the use of ‘kinda’ is completely out of register and out of place.
Thank you Mr Micawber,
Then what if I had used ‘kind of’ instead of ‘kinda’?
Thanks again
Hi Cristina,
What I want to know is whether you really got drunk and danced on the table?
(I’ll leave it to MM or Amy to confirm use of the tenses in your examples, because as a Brit I don’t use ‘gotten’ anyway, so only the first one sounds natural to me. However, my suspicion is that you’d need ‘then dancing’ in the second one to make it sound anywhere near reasonable.)
If you get confused with the tenses, then you should turn the present participle phrases into noun clauses. By doing that, you make the tenses more observable.
-
I kinda regret that I got drunk and danced on the table last night. (correct)
-
I kinda regret that I had gotten drunk and danced on the table last night. (will be correct if you add ‘then’ before ‘danced’ as Bee suggested. It shows that you got drunk BEFORE you danced, somehow justifying the use of past perfect in the first action.)
-
I kinda regret that I had gotten drunk and had danced on the table last night. (incorrect since the use of past perfect here is unjustifiable.)
It’s all my opinion; take it with a grain of salt lol.
Hi Bee,
Nope, I didn’t. It was just a made-up sentence. It is a bit colourful, isn’t it? 
I can honestly say I have never got drunk in my entire life (no, I am not expecting you to believe me). Up until a couple of years ago, a glass of beer was more than enough to make me feel tipsy (now that I have got more practice, I need two glasses in order to achieve the same effect. :-)).
Oh, yes, one of the differences between AmE and BE – the Americans use ‘gotten’ where Brits use ‘got’.
Hi Cristina,
As MM has already said, ‘kinda’ is simply a written transcription of the way ‘kind of’ is often pronounced in everyday informal speech. You might say it’s a lazy pronunciation. It tends to roll off the tongue more easily and quickly than ‘kind of’ does. You can compare the pronunciation ‘kinda’ to the following pronunciations:
sorta (sort of)
gotta (got to)
wanna (want to)
woulda (would’ve)
coulda (could’ve)
shoulda (should’ve)
I suppose the spoken pronunciation of ‘have to’ (obligation) might also be somewhat comparable: hafta
These are not actually words but rather representations of the way certain pairs of words are often pronounced. It’s not precise/careful pronunciation.
At any rate, the meaning of (and pronunciation of) ‘kind of’ that I was referring to is not something I would expect to hear used in higher (more formal) registers. In everyday informal conversation, I would not expect people to typically choose to say something such as ‘I regret having gotten drunk last night’ over the much simpler ‘I regret getting drunk last night’. So, adding either ‘kind of’ or ‘kinda’ to the former would also seem out of place to me.
- “Oh, man! I kinda regret doing all those shots last night. Feeling kinda hangdog today. But it was kinda fun dancing on the tables.”
:~)
By the way, ‘kinda’ is such a common (mis)pronunciation of ‘kind of’ that you can actually do a search for it in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). A search in COCA for ‘kinda’ got over 1600 results. That’s a lot for COCA – especially since ‘kinda’ isn’t technically a word.
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[size=75]“Once you figure out who you are and what you love about yourself, I think it all kinda falls into place.” ~ Jennifer Aniston[/size]
Thank you for your comments, Atomos, and yes, I always keep that in mind – especially when getting advice from
non-native English speakers.
Hi Amy,
Thank you for your explanations.
Yes, I am aware of all those informal words/transcriptions of words.
I regret getting drunk and dancing on the table last night.
I regret having gotten/got drunk and then dancing on the table last night.
I regret having gotten/got drunk and having danced on the table last night.
Are the tenses alright in those sentences but the first one is the most natural sounding?
Thank you
Yes, the first one would be the most commonly used.
You can also use the perfect form.
-
I regret having gotten drunk and dancing on the table last night.
I see no need whatsoever to try to indicate the order of events here since the speaker simply regrets that both things happened. The two things happened at roughly the same time in the past. It is quite unlikely that the speaker regrets the order in which they occurred.
The order in which the actions appear in the sentence tends to suggest that the drinking began before the dancing did. However, it is entirely possible that they began at the same time. It is also possible that the drinking started first but continued while/after the person was dancing on the table (and thus the degree of drunkenness very possibly increased after the dancing began).
-
I regret having gotten drunk and having danced on the table last night.
This is the least natural to me. It’s rather clunky and heavy with the repetition of ‘having’. The perfect form (both verbs) is unnecessary.
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[size=75]“Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” Ernest Hemingway[/size]
Hi Amy,
How many times have your ever danced on the table, and were you drunk at the time?
All clear – thanks, Amy.
I think that it is adjective and is not word or name because in sentence he said I can not buy the car it is kinda expensive and I think that it means very
Ha ha.
Actually, I don’t recall ever dancing on a table myself, not even when I was young and frisky. I vaguely recall a rather extreme bout of inebriation on my 21st birthday, the day it became legal for me to drink. Only a few fuzzy memories of the beginning of the evening remain, though. Each one of the 6 or 7 friends I’d gone out with bought me a drink – all at the same time. I may well have ended up under the table on that occasion. 
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[size=75]“The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.” ~ Aristotle[/size]
Hmmm… so it’s just Cristina who’s done that then.
(I think she’s protested her innocence too much!)