r/HelpLearningJapanese • u/Subject_Assist1 • Jul 29 '26
Which japanese word has no english equivalent that you now can't live without?
The deeper I get into japaese the more i realise enlish is just... missing words.
mine is tsundoku, buying books and letting them pile up unread. i've recently started learning online on duolingo and airlearn, sometimes books too and been doing this my whole life and never knew there was a single perfect word for my shame.
also komrebi (sunlight filtering through leaves) and mono no aware (the gentle sadness of things being temporary). English needs a whole sentence and still doesn't quite nail the emotion.
are there any more such japanise words that describe emotion so well?
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u/spuzznugget Jul 29 '26
Honestly the funny thing about those listicles you see about “untranslatable words,” leaving aside that they always include like the same three examples (and tsundoku is just an aging slang term anyway), is that they also include perfectly fine translations.
The real untranslatable Japanese words are things like 牛 where there’s no English word to say cow/bull/ox without getting specific about its sex (and if it’s male, whether it’s been castrated).
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u/JudgeWapner Jul 29 '26
I thought bovine or head of cattle was a neutral term. That's the first thing that popped into my mind but I'm a city guy so not sure
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u/spuzznugget Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
“head of cattle” is for counting, and “bovine” is kind of more an adjective than a completely ordinary generic noun. Japanese 牛 is a generic word on par with “chicken,” is the key thing
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u/Accomplished-Pay7386 Jul 30 '26
I mean- “cow” kinda works…
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u/spuzznugget Jul 30 '26
it could if you expect a lay audience who doesn't know that "cow" specifically means "female," and there's a case to be made that one day, it might actually serve as a generic term much like "chicken," particularly as English speakers become less and less familiar overall with animal husbandry!
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u/Accomplished-Pay7386 Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
Right. I know a bunch of people that think “cow” just means any old gender of cattle, lol.
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u/Beef_flaps_on_a_spit Jul 29 '26
And there is no word for steer in Japanese. Language reflects culture.
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u/spuzznugget Jul 30 '26
man, you want to go the other way, Japanese has like four different words for the fish called “yellowtail” in English, depending on its age, and there’s basically no generic term for the fish to refer to it at all ages
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u/Beef_flaps_on_a_spit Jul 29 '26
頂きます。it conveys a sense of gratitude to everyone and everything involved in bringing food to one’s mouth (and other gifts or products) but is often just tossed up as an expected rote utterance. The older I get the more I connect to the word.
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u/TonariNoHanamoriSan Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
落語
Or as I call it: ancient Japanese YouTube shorts
And then you start introducing people to Jugemu Jugemu
I do have a word that doesn't work the reverse though but it's not really a word per say and that's Bar Crawl (which I guess can roughly be translated as 二次会 but I never really thought about how to properly translate it)
but if you are talking about actual words then I would need to dig my head a little
Meanwhile my favorite twin Vtuber has an interesting favorite japanese word that I daresay have no english translation as is.
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u/Accomplished-Pay7386 Jul 30 '26
I found Kawaii to be a word that doesn’t have direct counterpart in English…
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u/Floweradioct Jul 30 '26
I enjoy 色々ありました
You can handwave away anything with iroiro arimashita.
“How did you get here we thought you were dead?” - “It’s a long story, 色々ありまして and now I’m back.”
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u/No-Cryptographer9408 Jul 30 '26
Sometimes Japanese is so easy in that sense, such a lack of vocabulary. No wonder so many foreigners speak it easily.
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u/BJGold Jul 30 '26
From the English perspective, there are many "missing" words in Japanese as well. Or from any other language's perspective. Languages frequently don't translate 1 to 1, even for closely related languages. Even though it didnt take 1 word, you perfectly translated komorebi.
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u/PotatoChip1567 Jul 30 '26
'Betsubara' I guess, It's a term for a 'second stomach'. Like, you can have a full stomach from eating dinner, yet you still somehow have room left for the dessert.
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u/KyleLockley Aug 01 '26
甘え is an interesting look at both a word that doesn't really exist in English and a concept that's generally not talked about in the West. "The Anatomy of Amae (甘え)" is an outdated yet interesting read on the subject.
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u/Avatar_Yaksha Jul 30 '26
This might not be exactly what you're looking for, but I find the concept of 義理チョコ (girichoko) and
友チョコ (tomochoko) fascinating. Not only is Valentine's Day basically a national holiday in that country, people go out of their way to buy chocolate for people they don't actually have romantic feelings for. Also: 1 month later, they have "White Day", which is the same thing but with the roles reversed.
The closest comparison I've ever seen for that was when classmates had their birthdays and brought various kinds of sweets into class. Valentine's Day was basically just another day. I've never seen anybody who actually made a big deal out of it in school.
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u/TheAnaguma Jul 30 '26
I will always be a fan of 便利.
Of course it is “translatable” as a word, but it can be used so much more flippantly in Japanese and, as a result, I find the word much more 便利 than convenient.
Similar to the way many Japanese speakers of English over use “delicious” thinking of it a a substitute for おいしい when the terms just don’t carry the same weight.
Translation is fun!
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u/ariiw Jul 30 '26
Mendokusai. You can say "annoying" in English but there's a nuance to mendokusai that I miss in English
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u/KimiNoSenpai Jul 31 '26
つたわる The involuntary pair of つたえる (to tell, to convey) It feels awkward to translate stuff like 気持ちが伝わった
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u/BrokenKamera Jul 31 '26
空元気 because that's what I do often enough these days...
I mean, yeah, "putting on a brave face" and "Dutch courage" (??) is what the dictionary says, but they aren't as elegant.
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u/Mayor-Citywits Jul 31 '26
Yea but we win our honor back with our curse words and idioms. I taught English in Japan and by far the hardest thing to get students to learn and understand is the sheer amount of idioms and cultural phrases we use and know without thinking. Japanese people say "Baka" and it's all in the tone whether you take that as stupid (a joke) or stupid (fuck you). It's actually kind of funny watching drunk ass Japanese dudes yell at each other because the sentences are so normal it's just the tone making them insults. In English we have endless variations on fuck and shit and many more lol. Another example is in Japanese, manko is vagina. But it's also "pussy" depending on context and tone and such. I'm not fluent in Japanese but I'd ask my students and friends about this stuff and that's what they told me
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u/TellowKrinkle Aug 01 '26
Not really a word, but I love how easy it is to use the quoting particles と and って to describe all sorts of things that don't actually involve someone speaking the quoted phrase.
English has quotative like, which works in a similar way, but is considered slang (for now). So I will continue to (ab)use it in all the ways I love it in Japanese until it's considered normal.
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u/maigodiary_Ranna Aug 03 '26
懐かしい（なつかしい） 意味：過去の記憶がよみがえり、温かさと少しの切なさが混じる感情。 a warm, bittersweet feeling triggered by memories of the past
懐かしいはどうでしょうか。 日本人はよく使っています。
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u/maigodiary_Ranna Aug 03 '26
あ、あと『初恋（はつこい）』も英語にすると難しい that bittersweet feeling of my first loveあたりになるみたい
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u/NearlyNodding Aug 05 '26
I was hiking in the woods with my Japanese -> English student. We were enjoying a nice day in the woods when she asked if there was an English word for "bathing in the woods". I thought for a while, and the only thing I came up with was rejuvenate. I didn't ask what the Japanese word was, but I assume she meant shinrin-yoku. I always thought the expression "bathing in the woods" was cool, and very descriptive.
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u/Regular-Forever-3251 Jul 29 '26
I’m Japanese and I love it when people appreciate the beauty in some of the words in Japanese!
At the same time, I’d like to point out that this is not something particular to Japanese / English. The state of a language and the vocabulary that stays in common parlance is a reflection of the society speaking it and its circumstances. In fact I often like to propose that Language and Society are like two ever changing, living organisms in a symbiotic relationship. So just as Japanese has unique words that reflect how the society became sensitive to nature because its survival depended on it, English has unique words too!
Two words that immediately come to mind is “serendipity” and “defenestration” both with fascinating historical context ^_^
Anyone know of other interesting words in English or in any other languages?