
Japanese Words That Don't Exist in English - phodo
https://beta.theodysseyonline.com/11-beautiful-untranslatable-japanese-words
======
pdonis
I find it interesting that the article calls these words "untranslatable" but
then proceeds to translate them. Yes, there are no single words in English
that have the exact meanings of the single words in Japanese, but
"untranslatable" gives the impression of not being able to convey the meaning
in English even with multiple words--but that's exactly what the article does.

~~~
boondaburrah
The thing with "untranslatable" words is that their perfectly translatable,
but the connotations surrounding them are completely different. What
untranslatable then means in this context is that the listener of the
translated version will /not/ understand the same meaning as someone listening
to the non-translated version.

For instance, while the literal translation of shouganai is "it can't be
helped," I'll translate it as "shit happens" in one situation, or "that's
bureaucracy for you" (among other things) in another, depending on context.
There simply isn't a reliable equivalent.

Also, imagine a scene (one that occurs every day at the end of my restaurant
shift) where everyone is saying "otsukare" to each other. How should I
translate that? Should I just have people yelling "TIRED" to the room? I'd
have translated the word 'correctly' but not actually reflected the general
feeling of "wow, we did it bro. Good job"

I'm currently learning Japanese. As I've learned these 'untranslatable words'
of course I learned them through dictionaries and English explanations. As I
saw them used and used them myself, though, they came to mean something
different. I had to develop a new concept to compile them to, as it were. Now
I find them difficult to translate back to English, and instead they have
become new words in my vocabulary. It's why pigeon languages happen. (you
should see the English spoken in the English-speaking office I worked at. It's
stolen many Japanese words)

~~~
vixen99
'It's stolen many Japanese words'. That's the beauty of English and partly the
cause of its universal success: it appropriates or invents as necessary.
Moreover it doesn't have a committee deciding which words are acceptable.

~~~
r-w
Well, it does, but nobody listens!

------
bitwize
I like these:

 _Murahachibu_ : shunning, public ostracism. Originally meant being excluded
from eight (out of ten) aspects of village life. The two jobs which a person
under murahachibu were still allowed to perform were firefighting and
undertaking, considered the meanest, dirtiest, and least desirable jobs.
Handling corpses was thought to make a person "unclean", and persons who did
so were isolated to the slummiest village districts called _buraku_ ; from
these are descended the _burakumin_ , who (much like blacks in the USA) have
been historically an oppressed underclass and yet have contributed much to the
modern street culture of Japan.

Modern murahachibu is practiced in a less severe form: if you fail to kiss the
right asses and scratch the right backs in your professional or social life,
you will find yourself without help when you most need help.

 _Daikon ashi_ : thick legs (on a woman). A daikon is, of course, a long thick
radish used in Japanese cooking. It turns out that Japanese women are at least
as self-conscious about not having a "thigh gap" as are Western women.

 _Tachiyomi_ : to "read standing up". When you're in a bookshop and you pick a
book off the shelf and start reading it right in the shop. Manga fans love to
do this; bookshop owners will sometimes throw people out for doing it. Brings
back memories of being an early teen and heading straight for the magazine
racks to read ALL THE GAMING MAGAZINES while my mother did the shopping.

------
11thEarlOfMar
I really like:

"Kintsukuroi": the art of repairing pottery with gold or silver joining the
pieces and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been
broken.

Westerners have the Nietzsche'esque notion of 'what does not kill you makes
you stronger'. But "Kintsukuroi" is more like 'what does not destroy you makes
you more beautiful.' It's as if the effort and care taken to repair the item
confers a sense of heightened value on it.

~~~
Ayaz
It is beautiful, to say the least.

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kohsuke
There's one word that I expected to be in the list but it isn't, which is
もったいない (mottai nai)

It describes the situation where something/someone that is still of some use
is left unused and wasted, such as leaving food on the table or wasting
somebody's talent.

I'm a Japanese who's been living in the US for more than a decade, and I
always thought this one word represents what's missing in American culture the
most.

~~~
mcphage
That sounds like it's most equivalent to "squadered": [http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/squander](http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/squander)

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2muchcoffeeman
English probably borrows from other languages more than any other.

What's stopping us from just stealing these words? In Singapore for example,
people will often just drop in a Malay or Cantonese word.

~~~
torgoguys
Nothing. A few of those are already on their way to being borrowed. I've read
"kintsugi" (slightly different spelling than the article) in a very much in
English legal brief and heard at least one other (wabi-sabi) in another
context, again used as if it were part of English. If they're useful, they may
just get assimilated.

------
est
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective

------
aji
This makes me wonder what English words are unique to English, kind of like
"breakfast" (in the context of a Burmese tribe) mentioned at the top of the
article. There's gotta be a few, right?

~~~
euske
English words that don't exist in Japanese:

* identity (the notion simply does not exist here)

* fairness (we don't care this either)

* racist (but it doesn't mean we don't have it, we're simply unaware of it)

And yes, there's an awkward translation for these words, but they all sound
very foreign.

edit: added newlines

Another edit: I read that words like "liberty", "equality" or even "love"
didn't exist in Japanese until 19c, when people were importing Western
documents to Japan. That's probably why we're still so behind of these things.

~~~
titanix2
Love existed in the language way before the XIX century: 'ai' (愛), 'koi' (恋)
but interestingly enough, these are also loanwords (from Chinese).

~~~
euske
Being in a dictionary didn't mean people used it. In my view, a word doesn't
really exist until it reaches a certain widespread use.

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justifier
japanese and german share a lexical pattern

the more syllables in a word then the fewer definitions it has

it is interesting to me that the author chose these 'types' of words to
highlight

their highly specialised nature makes them far more translatable than the
Japanese words i find most beautiful

my favourite japanese word is 間,ma (o)

it is difficult to translate because it simultaneously carries multiple
meanings: "gap", "space", "pause" or "the space between two structural
parts"(i); it can refer to any existence of negatives space, be it temporal,
physical or metaphysical

the kanji is a combination of the characters for: gate(ii) and sun(iii); two
of the most important symbols in japanese iconography, and the question of
whether the sun is setting or rising between the gate is up to interpretation
as well

(o)
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%96%93](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%96%93)

(i)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(negative_space)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_\(negative_space\))

(ii)
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%96%80](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%96%80)

(iii)
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5)

~~~
jcranmer
Polysemy is fairly common in languages. In my French-English dictionary,
working out how to translate the simple word "get" takes up over two pages--
and most of that is not dealing with the English proclivity for coining
idiomatic verb phrases (e.g., "to put up" is completely different from any
connotation of "to put" with the preposition "up"). The verbs "go", "set", and
"put" also have impressively long definition lists if you consider these
derivative verb phrases.

~~~
justifier
> with the English proclivity for coining idiomatic verb phrases

English does love idioms, and though they can be frustrating, the time to
learn them in any language always pays off..an idiom

Idioms are a huge factor in changing a language and keeping it new, and often
are born of rebellion and subversion

Idioms and puns used to feel insular to me so I began collecting international
versions of them

Nomihodai is a Japanese idiom that means 'all you can eat', but speak it aloud
to a Spanish speaker and now you are using the Spanish idiom 'no me jodas'
meaning 'don't fuck with me'

English's biggest annoyance, or strength?, is it's abundance of propositions..
look up the French word 'de'(o) in you fr-en dictionary

(o)
[https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/de#French](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/de#French)

~~~
jcranmer
I did look it up. de wasn't nearly so bad, managing only a few inches of
space. «faire» was the worst of the French words I could think up, squeezing
out around a page.

The problem with English prepositions is that much of their usage isn't really
analyzable as prepositions. "to put", "to put up", and "to put up with" are
all effectively three different verbs, and those prepositions are usually
better analyzed as particles. However, grade school English grammar tends to
be derived from attempts to analyze English according to traditional Greek
grammar, which turns out to work poorly in practice (and hence, everything you
learned in English class is probably wrong).

------
Aelinsaar
Nothing is quite as beautiful and poetic as the German, 'Backpfeifengesicht',
meaning sort of "A face that wants to be slapped".

~~~
11thEarlOfMar
Or the marginally less snarky 'Gemütlichkeit':

A space or state of warmth, friendliness, and good cheer. Other qualities
include coziness, peace of mind, belonging, well being, and social acceptance.
The term is most commonly associated with the tenor of a German beer garden.

Now. Use it in a sentence.

~~~
rasur
Kannst du meine Gemütlichkeit nicht stören, bitte.

(or something... ;) )

~~~
misterS
Probier's mal mit Gemütlichkeit!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_EWWyJfgPc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_EWWyJfgPc)

No idea what the song is in English, though :)

Edit: got it, "Bare Necessities":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ogQ0uge06o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ogQ0uge06o)

~~~
rasur
Ha, fantastic, thanks!

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Grue3
Well, at least half of Japanese words are borrowed either from English or from
Chinese, so it works in reverse as well.

Here's one that nobody mentioned yet:

 _Tsundoku_ \- when you buy new books but end up never reading them

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shawnps
Certainly the first time I've seen "otsukaresama" described as "beautiful".
It's like something you say to your coworkers when you pass them in the
hallway.

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rajahafify
Komorebi is called God's Ray in video game sphere.

------
Synaesthesia
The Japanese word "mu" can be translated as "I reject the premise of your
question" \- a word which would be very useful in English.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_\(negative\))

~~~
sdrothrock
It's not really a word; it's a prefix or an abbreviation. Nobody would ever
say "mu" alone, let alone to mean "I reject the premise of your question" in
conversation, even if it were culturally acceptable.

~~~
roel_v
Well it's used as a word in the mu koan. Might be archaic and not used in
modern Chinese or Japanese, I don't know, but for 'mu' as the prefix we have
(as far as I understand, which is admittedly not particularly deep) 'not'.
'Mu' as in 'your question is based on faulty premises' is the more useful form
for Westerners, I'd argue.

~~~
sdrothrock
The koan in question is Chinese, not Japanese; Japanese allows for the reading
of old Chinese with Japanese readings, but Japanese people won't understand it
without specific knowledge of how to read Japanized Chinese, so it's in a
really weird place in general -- it's definitely not something I'd call a
"Japanese word," though.

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teekert
Why is it impossible to select words from that article? (FF current)

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partycoder
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXI1GHtqDEU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXI1GHtqDEU)

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djsumdog
Hmm...my adblock doesn't work on that site. There's an ad between each word.
It actually made me more enraged. It's a listy, click bait, rubbish, bullshit
article.

