[This is the first of hopefully many ‘word of the day’ posts, in an effort to help me with my appalling Japanese, especially for business situations]
Today’s Japanese word of the day is ‘gaisan’ (がいさん／概算). This means to provide an estimate for something.
I learned this whilst talking to some vendors today, to price up some work we’re thinking of doing. This was an especially useful word to understand in that meeting, since at first I thought they were talking about someone called Mr. Gai (or Ms. Gai) who calculates their quotes.
Examples from WWWJDIC here.
This then, shouldn’t be confused with ‘mitsumori’ (みつもり／見積もり), which is closer to ‘quotation’, which of course to lawyers and accountants is a completely different thing. Again, don’t confuse this with a person’s family name either!