Climbing vocabulary?

My biggest hobby is climbing. Indoors more than outdoors at the moment (I live in London).

In class, when asked about our weekends, I’ll often say ボルダリングをしました。

I’d like to improve my vocabulary to discuss what climbing I’ve done.
Do I need different words for indoor and outdoor climbing? [1]

I’d love to know how to discuss lead and bouldering indoors, along with bouldering, sport and trad outdoors.


  1. In the UK, this is often context based.
    In London, If I say I went climbing, it will be assumed to be indoor unless I add ‘outdoor’, ‘trad’ or a location.
    In the Lakes (where I’ll be in two weeks :grinning_face:), it will be assumed to be outdoors and I would specify if I was indoors. ↩︎

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This is probably not what you’re looking for, but I can recommend a great manga about a mountaineering club, although, potentially way too hard if you’re at the beginner stage.

I learned lots of relevant words though like 確保 (kakuho - belay, secure) !

YouTube could be another good source. I’m looking for a channel @soggyboy recommended to me but I can’t find it :open_mouth: so maybe soggy will appear to drop that :eyes:

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Depending on your Japanese level / tolerance for ambiguity, I enjoyed the videos of 宮崎 美子(みやざき よしこ) starting her bouldering journey at 60-something years old.

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Thank you. I like mountaineering too but don’t really get to do any; I still am considering doing a Scottish winter course.

One of the problems I have found is the word ‘climb’ in English is very broad.

“I climbed Snowdon in summer” - walked
“I climbed the North face of the Eiger” - mountaineering
“I climbed The Old Man of Hoy” - multipitch trad climbing

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Yeah I agree that is a broad word.

Though I did mean the kind of outdoor climbing you want as well as mountaineering and some hiking. It has it all! But no indoor so far

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We have an avid climber here, @ptb . :heart:

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No it does look great but definitely too hard for me at the moment. I’ll try and see if a vocab list exists for it though.

確保 かくほ Belay - is a great start!

Indoors is the biggest issue - so many of the words from the dictionary seem to imply outdoor climbing and I just don’t know if that distinction exists.

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You can browse amazon to get familiar with some vocab but it’s going to be boring very quickly.

That topic has reminded me of a (somewhat realistic) conversation about climbing on that page of my site. If you understand it that might make you smile.

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I bet you’re right, there are probably specific terms. I’m curious too, now, I also love climbing, although it’s been a while. Hopefully someone with experience finds your thread

:grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Kaho!

Kaho does hiking/trekking. The videos vary on whether it’s something that looks like a chill walk in the woods to the onsen, or climbing to the summit of Mt Denali. So her channel won’t help with indoor climbing but it’s a really fun channel to watch so I recommend!

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It took some translating but I’m glad I did. Sounds like many beginner climber conversations.

Also

足場 あしば foothold - another good word!

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Makes me think of Honister boulders - climbing fallen rocks!

Photo not me

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definitely try starting out via wikipedia jp version and getting basic terms you can go from and then expanding out to blogs and youtube is the method I usually take when I want to learn more about specialized vocab. don’t forget yahoo jp as well. and if you can avoid the awfulness of twitter (jp users seem to have less problems and are sticking with it) searching climbing terms/hashtags could probably be useful too.

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