Japanese Words English Doesn T Have

Although working hard is highly valued having a balance within yourself with nature and with the universe is considered equally important.

Japanese words english doesn t have. English has onomatopoeia but japanese has far more. Language is all about communication but sometimes we don t have the right word to describe something we re doing or experiencing so we have to explain it in more complex terms. But when a word is loaned from english english doesn t have kanji so the word doesn t get to have kanji in japanese either. 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.

The onomatopoeia for that kind of dizziness is kurukuru. Check it out here. We recently did a facebook live on this topic discussing common english words and phrases that aren t exactly in japanese. Such words loaned from the west are called gairaigo 外来語 and they undergo a process called katakanization and are written with katakana instead.

The people over at buzzfeed have put together these cool infographics for 16 japanese words that have no single equivalent word in english but that we could really do with a word for. Doesn t it make your head spin.