Culture
Japanese Words That Make It Into English Dictionaries
Recently three new Japanese words made their way into the Oxford English Dictionary, officially blessing the English speaking world with concepts such as hikikomori, karoshi, and otaku. But, these aren’t the only words that have done this, just the most recent ones. There are actually a lot of Japanese words that we use as English words now – it’s not only the Japanese who get to turn someone else’s language into their own.
Japanese Words That English Speakers Use Pretty Commonly
I thought it would be fun to list out and define a bunch of the common Japanese words that have made it into the English language. There’s a lot of them, and I don’t think I’ve thought of all of them, so if you come up with any add them in the comments and I’ll try to update the list for future people reading this article (hello, if you’re from the future. How are the flying cars?).
Anime: Japanese cartoons / animation.
Banzai: A cheer. Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!
Bento: A meal served in a box with separations in it.
Bonsai: These are the little trees that are actually really old, but are really small because they’ve been trimmed and stunted by bonsai artists.
Dojo: A place for martial artists to practice.
Futon: A thin mattress of tufted cotton batting or similar material
Haiku: A type of poem that (in English) is typically 5-7-5 syllables.
Hancho: Squad leader. The person in charge… i.e. the “Head Hancho.”
Hara-kiri: Suicide by disembowelment.
Hikikomori: The abnormal avoidance of social contact, especially by adolescent males.*
Jujitsu: A soft-style type of Japanese martial art.
Kamikaze: Literally means “divine wind” but in English it’s known to refer to a suicide attack (usually by airplane).
Karaoke: A machine that plays a song for you and has you sing along, usually with a bunch of people and a bunch of sake.
Karate: A hard-style type of Japanese martial art.
Karoshi: Death from overwork*
Kimono: Traditional Japanese clothing.
Koan: A paradox that Buddhist monks meditate on.
Manga: Japanese comics.
Miso: Made mostly from soybeans, this paste is in all kinds of foods, the most common being “miso soup.”
Ninja: The guys that wear black, sneak around, and assassinate people. These guys are sneaky.
Origami: The art of folding paper into different shapes, figures, etc.
Otaku: Huge fanboy of something, like anime, gundam models, or Tofugu (I know you’re all Tofugu otaku, right?)*
Ramen: Japanese noodle soupy dish.
Sake: Rice wine.
Samurai: A warrior from feudal Japan.
Sashimi: Raw fish, sliced into pieces (not to be confused with sushi).
Seppuku: Another word for disemboweling yourself.
Sudoku: The number placement puzzle that’s popular in a lot of newspapers and other places.
Sumo: This is the sport where two big guys try to knock each other down. i.e. “Sumo Wrestling.”
Sushi: a small bit of cold rice with something on top or inside it. C’mon, you know what sushi is.
Tsunami: Huge waves!
Tycoon: Someone who’s a powerful business person (original Japanese word, 大君 (taikun) means liege lord or shogunate, so it’s evolved in its English meaning).
Typhoon: A violent tropical storm or cyclone (probably originally a Chinese word, though).
Wasabi: Similar to horseradish. This is a green paste that’s nice and spicy, and often used with sushi.
Yakuza: Japanese mafia.
Zen: A sect of Buddhism in Japan.
*These three were just added to the official English Dictionary list!
Oh, and if you aren’t bored already (or are bored), here’s a video talking about the three new words that were just added: hikikomori, otaku, and karoshi. Enjoy!
So what else would you add to this list? Any other Japanese words you hear quite a bit that are used pretty easily in English? My favorite by far is hancho. I thought that was Spanish, or something.
Related posts:
Kanji Amnesia And Why It’s Okay To Forget Kanji
In a couple hours at 1:40pm Pacific Time, I’ll be live on BBC Radio (sorry, no idea which one… people tell me it’s probably #4, though) talking about “Character Amnesia” (or for us Tofugu-folk, “Kanji Amnesia”), so I thought a good way to get my ducks in a line would be to write a post about it… That way, hopefully, I won’t forget what I want to talk about it.
What Is “Character Amnesia” (Kanji Amnesia)?
Basically, people in Japan (and China) are using computers, phones, and other electronic devices so much that they’re forgetting how to write their kanji. Thanks to these things, there’s almost no reason to write something using your hands. Think about it, when’s the last time you hand wrote anything? For a lot of you, I’m guessing it was either to sign a receipt (or you just can’t remember). The world is revolving around our phones and computers, which means we’re typing… a lot.
It’s the exact same thing with Japanese, but with Japanese, you’re taking something really a lot more complicated to write (kanji) and making it a lot simpler. All you have to do nowadays is write the sounds that make up a word in Japanese, and *poof!* automagically your electronic device shows you the most likely kanji match to the thing you wrote out. If it’s not the first match, there’s usually quite a few others which you can choose from. This means the emphasis of being able to write kanji is nearly nonexistent in real life. All you have to do is be able to recognize a kanji and be able to read it. Literally half the work of written communication has vanished, and I think it’s awesome.
For those of you who don’t have much experience with kanji (if you want to learn, check out the kanji section of TextFugu for a way to learn kanji that actually makes sense), here’s a good parallel. With English (I know this from experience), spell check has made it so I don’t have to know how to spell things. Misspelled something? Red underline tells me to change it (thanks!). Once I start writing by hand, I definitely notice all the things I don’t know how to spell (anymore) that I probably learned in middle school. Take this example and multiply it by a billion, and you have the Kanji/Japanese issue. They can recognize the kanji. They can read the kanji. They can type the kanji… but, when it comes to writing a lot of kanji by hand, expect there to be a lot of mistakes and omissions.
To Be Honest, This Is Awesome
A lot of old school Japanese teachers will probably tell you otherwise. I was one of them not too long ago, until I started writing TextFugu, and started seeing what I could remove to make the lessons simpler. When I asked “what is pretty unnecessary 90% of the time?” I realized that the ability to write kanji by hand was one of them. So, I cut that requirement so that people can focus on much more important things (like being able to read… and type the kanji).
Even Japan is admitting to this. They’re going to add nearly 200 kanji to the required kanji learning list for kids because so many kanji have become a lot more common through use of typing the characters (i.e. a lot of characters that were tough to write by hand, but became common because they’re really easy to type out). On top of that, Japan is totally a cell-phone culture. Everyone seems to have a cell phone, and everyone seems to be typing away at it. It’s just so much easier to communicate in this way, and handwriting is becoming a thing of the past.
So, in summary, I don’t think this is a bad thing, especially for language learners out there. It just (once again) supports that the ability to hand write kanji is becoming increasingly unimportant. That means you can start focusing your limited efforts (everyone has limits, so you need to make the most of them!) on doing much more important things, whatever that may be. I think that’s amazing news. You have permission to spend your time learning things that you’ll be able to use a lot more commonly 
So what do you think? Any of you experienced this? I’ve definitely become terrible at hand writing kanji (embarrassingly terrible, actually), but on the other hand, it’s so easy to type kanji out that I have almost no reason to hand write anything. The cool thing? When I do have to hand write something, I just type it up first so I can use that as a reference… I hope any impending apocalypses don’t take away my cell phone, or I’ll be screwed.
Related posts:
5 Step JLPT Study Method Using Japanese Newspapers for Kids
This post was written by Nick W., who has traveled throughout many regions of Japan in search of unique cultural gems. He is currently earning his MBA and has researched topics like folk music in WWII Japan and Ainu cultural revival through music. His favorite Japanese musician is the late Nujabes. He has experienced great amounts of culture shock when unknowingly encountering kyabakura hostesses. In hindsight it was hilarious.
Passing the JLPT at any level requires being able to read some Japanese and of course the best way to learn to read is well….reading stuff. The problem with reading is that it’s really hard. For most of us below the JLPT Level 1, pulling out a newspaper, book, or magazine in Japanese and just reading and understanding it is next to impossible to do in a reasonable amount of time. To be fair, those newspapers, books, and magazines are written for adults and the JLPT only tests up to a middle school level of language comprehension. If our Japanese reading level is the same as kids, why not read like one? Most people solve this problem using manga, but the JLPT makes you to read paragraphs not text bubbles with pictures. Thanks to my JLPT prep class teacher, I found a great way to study for the JLPT: Japanese Newspapers for Kids!
Using a Japanese newspaper for kids, like Mainichi Shogakusei Shinbun above, I developed a 5 step study method designed to increase vocabulary and kanji identification, reading comprehension, and confidence for taking the JLPT! Reading at the appropriate level makes it possible to practice reading similar paragraphs that will appear in the test and gives you the chance to identify vocabulary and kanji that are likely to appear in the JLPT.
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Read the article without any helpful hiragana
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Identify and list unknown words
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Identify and list unknown kanji
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Study the new lists
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Re-read the article
Paired with Evernote and Jisho.org, this 5 step method should give you a good head start in your studying!
Step 1: Read the article without any helpful hiragana
I know it’s frustrating, sad, and hard, but reading the article first without any help will help you out in a lot of ways in the long run so stick with it and don’t cry! The first thing that will result from reading the article without any hiragana is helping you to honestly assess your reading ability. It will show you the words you know and the ones you don’t in black and white. The other important thing this step accomplishes is simulating the actual test. There will be no helpful hiragana in the real test, so why practice with it? If you are really serious about taking the test, you might also want to time yourself to see how long it takes to read a short article.
Using Evernote, I selected and added this text from an article on Mainichi Shogakusei Shinbun resulting in the above picture. The rockin thing about Evernote in this example is that it automatically makes a title and takes note of the original page you visited so you wont forget later! I then removed the pesky hiragana and gave reading the article my best shot.
Step 2: Identify and list unknown words
Crap…as you can see I’ve got a LONG way to go! In this step, highlight the words you don’t know in red and hope you don’t get an atomic red ink bomb like I did! It is important to be HONEST with yourself here. If you can’t read it without any help from hiragana, or if you look it up in the dictionary and say “Oh, right, duh! I know this one!” mark it red Donny, because you are OUT OF YOUR ELEMENT! lol. More seriously, just be conservative, if you don’t guess right the first time, it won’t hurt you to practice those borderline words a few times. In the end, it is really good practice to identify difficult words as they are used in a paragraph. When you are finished, your list should look something like this:
Step 3: Identify and list unknown kanji
In the vocabulary list, find and highlight kanji in red that you can’t recognize right away as demonstrated in the example above. Once identified, use a Japanese dictionary to make a list of kanji for future reference. I found the website jisho.org VERY useful in completing this step. Copy and paste the unknown kanji from the vocab list to the kanji list and as long as you don’t cut and paste anything else, you can simply paste it again into the kanji search page of jisho.org. Once you look up the kanji, the website spits out more information than anyone can dream about that specific kanji. I recommend at least taking note of all the different readings for the kanji and the definition in English. One extra step I took was to include other words that that kanji appears in to practice recognition in general. Jisho.org has a great feature to do this by pressing on the link in the “Kanji” page called “Words Containing” and usually zillions of words will come up that use this kanji, which can then be paired down to common words if desired. Here is an example of a finished kanji list made from an article:
Step 4: Study the new lists
Now we get to the hard part: you have to remember all the stuff you just wrote down! Making lots of lists is a waste of time if you don’t actually go back through them to learn the material. Try to use the words in a sentence, look up more kanji combination, use them in a diary or homework assignment, or use Textfugu to learn about remembering radicals to help you retain the lists you just wrote. Whatever you decide to do, be proactive and do something…anything! It will pay off for the text and for the next step in this method.
Step 5: Re-read the article
Now that you are the master of all the vocabulary and kanji that stumped you in the article you read, go back and rock it! Of course leave out the hiragana, and see how much you retained. If there are still words and kanji that you miss, go back to the lists you made and study them for a while and re-read the article again. Hopefully by the end of this process you will understand the meaning of the article, which will be a critical part in the new test. Practicing reading full paragraphs will make life a lot easier for you when you actually sit down for the JLPT. Good luck passing the JLPT!
LINKS
Newspapers for Kids:
- http://mainichi.jp/life/edu/maishou/index.html
- http://yomoyomo.jp/index.php
- http://kids.goo.ne.jp/index.html?SY=0&MD=2
Dictionaries:
Other Resources:
- http://www.textfugu.com
- http://www.tofugu.com/2010/04/06/tofugu-100-best-japanese-learning-resources/
- http://www.tofugu.com/2010/03/09/how-to-use-evernote-to-study-japanese-or-any-other-language/
Related posts:
Four Japanese Words For Summer (And Gifts From The Venerable Gakuranman)
Greetings fellow fugu-ers! Gakuranman here. (That’s right, ‘schoolboy coat man’.) You may remember me from such indie B-posts as ‘Katakana Words Ate My Soul‘ and Invasion of the Kanji.
But not to fear! I’ve returned today to shower you with gifts. Gifts of knowledge and prosperity. Your Japanese skills will soar and…ahh, what the heck. Let’s just get on with it. Here’s some words related to the Japanese summer with a few colourful anecdotes. Because, you know, language and culture are inseparable. Kinda like this twisted daikon above. Also a mini giveaway for you hungry learners at the end of this post!
夏バテ (natsubate) – Summer Lethargy
Here in Japan, summer comes in a self-contained bubble of humidity. For about 3-5 months of the year, temperatures soar and people drop like flies having had all the life force sucked out of them. You might imagine that everyone slips into a zombified state doing nothing but waving 扇子 (sensu – folding fans) or うちわ (uchiwa – paper fans) and you wouldn’t be far off. So yes, right now yours truly is attempting to fight off zombifiction from the suffering summer heat. That’s natsubate for you!
セミ (semi) – cicada (noisy insect!)
Ahh, the sound of summer. Do you have these little critters where you live? For me in the U.K, we always had a resident wood pigeon who would coo sweet pigeon melodies down our chimney pipe. Now when I leave the house it sounds like a battleground, littered with the corpses of these short-lived insects. Personally, my ears have always interpreted the noise as the sound of Spaniards. (No offence to our Spanish friends our there, or the Inquisition!) Si si si si si si si si si. Sisisisisisisisisssss…..
かき氷 (kakigoori) – Shaved Ice.
Or so the dictionary tells us. I prefer to think of them as mounds of delicious cool. Covered with your favourite flavoured syrup (awesome, two British spellings in a row, right there!), these heavenly creations can be the only thing keeping you alive through many hot days. Other summer necessities include ちゅうちゅう (chuu-chuu) – flavoured ice lollies – or ガリガリ君 (garigari-kun) – a particular brand of ice pole sporting a kid with big teeth!
線香花火 (senkou-hanabi) – Sparkler
A kind of Japanese sparkler. You get all the fizz and crackle of normal sparklers, but with a curious little ball of hot goo forming at the tip. The ball grows bigger and bigger as the firework continues, before dropping to the floor and dying. People compete to see whose ball will hang on the longest. Very poetic and a great metaphor for many things Japanese, I reckon – the fleeting beauty found in transient objects and all that. I’m curious though, do they have these fireworks in other countries? I’ve only seen them in Japan myself.
There you have it then. A few summery Japanese words. Little and often eh? That’s the best way to keep up your Japanese studies, young grasshoppers (or should I say cicadas? har har har).
Well, I know you guys can’t get enough of giveaways around here, so as I promised here’s another great chance to win cool stuff from Japan. I have not less than *12* sets of prizes to ship out, including:
Stuff for learning Japanese while lounging in the loo.
And items for poking people with.
How about a pointy Japanese phrasebook to help your language studies?
Or, since we all worship the Tofu-gu around here, some authentic tofu-flavoured paper! In actual tofu packaging!
Oh yes. These and a Schoolboy-coat-man signed postcard from Japan could be yours. All you have to do is tell me what your best advice is for learning a foreign language.
Check out the full post for detailed information (and an embarrassing video!) I’m also giving a little time extension because you all rock. You have until Wednesday 25th August 2010! Not long then! Go for it!
P.S. If you think summer is too warm, you should follow Gakuranman on Twitter.
P.P.S. If you thought that tofu flavored paper was a good idea, you should try to win something from his contest.
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