11 Beautiful Japanese Words That Don't Exist In English

[yuiyoshida]

Untranslatable words from Japan, the polite and nature-loving country.
Marie Sugio in Lifestyle on Nov 16, 2015

Once, when I asked my friend from a small tribe in Burma how they would say “breakfast” there, she told me that they didn’t have a word for it because they only ate twice a day--lunch and dinner. I happen to have a lot of friends who speak English as their second language and that made me realize that a language has a lot to do with its culture’s uniqueness. Because of that there are some untranslatable words.
In Japanese culture, people have a lot of appreciation towards nature and it is very important to be polite towards others. That politeness and the nature appreciation reflected on to its language and created some beautiful words that are not translatable to English.

http://theodysseyonline.com/le-moyne/11-beautiful-untranslatable-japanese-words/221351

how many of the words do you know?

[jonno99]

1. K&R - cool, thanks for the post! nt.

[Nitram]

2. English might have more onomatopoetic words than you know.

English has onomatopoeia, but Japanese has far more. For example, we have “om-nom-nom” for eating and they have “paku-paku” for eating normally, “baku-baku” for eating wildly, “gatsu-gatsu” for eating fast, “mogu-mogu” for chewing a lot, etc. Doesn’t it make your head spin?

Chew, chomp, slurp are all onomatopoetic words used for eating. Dogs: bark, ruff-ruff, bow-wow, woof-woof, arf, yip,yap, howl.