What are your favorite Japanese words, kanji, or grammar structures?
As for my favorite word I really like 食道 (しょくどう) which means esophagus, and it just makes me laugh that the kanji literally are food and road.
金 (きん)means gold
玉(たま)means ball
and if you put them together…NSFW
I really love the word 最近(さいきん)which means recently. I just really like how it sounds. Any words with the あい sound in them I like, but also I really enjoy writing out the kana for this one. The flicks on さ and き are so satisfying.
As for favorite kanji, at the moment it’s 茶. I’m a big tea lover so I’m pretty bias, but the character is just so elegant and nice to look at.
I’ve never really thought about having a favorite grammar thing. I guess I’d say verb normalization, since the first time I learned about it, it blew my mind (shameful promotion of my thread on mind blows in Japanese).
Also another word I just thought of that made me laugh the first time I heard it: 言語道断(ごんごどうだん), meaning ridiculous / outrageous. Personally I think this is the perfect autological word (a word which describes itself).
Bonus words: 学校(がっこう)、花火(はなび)、おはよ、ありがとう、回る(まわる)、雪(ゆき)、する
You’re in luck! It has a bunch of homophones!
These all have the same pitch accent as well.
細菌 - bacteria
再勤 - reappointment
細謹 - slight flaw
採金 - gold mining
截金 - metallic foil cut into strips or other shapes to form decorative motifs
That would make saying “There was a slight flaw in the bacteria reappointment in our gold mining facilities to produce more metallic foil cut into strips or other shapes to form decorative motifs.” really challenging.
My favorite’s gotta be 首になる.
Sweet, thanks! Now I can talk about making a reappointment for my gold mining project because recently there was a slight flaw in some metallic foil cut into strips which caused an outbreak of bacteria.
That would make saying “There was a slight flaw in the bacteria reappointment in our gold mining facilities to produce more metallic foil cut into strips or other shapes to form decorative motifs.” really challenging.
Great minds think alike.
最近細金は細謹があったから、細菌の発生があった。だから、採金について再勤を予定しなくちゃ。
(さいきんさいきんはさいきんがあったから、さいきんのはっせいがあった。だから、さいきんについてさいきんをよていしなくちゃ。)
I met a Japanese guy once who told me about the saying 迎え酒 (むかえざけ). It’s basically the Japanese version of the saying “hair of the dog”, but the actual translation is “hello again sake” or “welcome back sake”.
猫 - coz I love my tomcat!
Probably 介錯人. I can’t really think of anything more important.
So you like testicles?
I’m liking the minimalism of grammar as a whole a lot so far, but conjugation specifically doesn’t get enough appreciation. I made the mistake of taking Latin in school, and Japanese conjugation is incredibly simple and straight forward in comparison to the mess of a conjugation chart that is latin, or the 200-something commonly used irregular verbs in english.
葉 - favorite word and kanji. I’m not sure why… I really like the idea of leaves and the image of leaves that comes into my head when I see the kanji or smth… It’s more of an intuition thing, really.
I understand that. In high school I took Chinese, Japanese, French and Spanish. Although French and Spanish weren’t necessarily hard, the conjugation was the worst part. After a year of college I went and lived in the Baltic States for a little bit where I learned Russian and the grammar is a nightmare. I am so grateful Japanese doesn’t conjugate verbs depending on subject, that nouns have genders, or that words decline depending on cases. I am grateful that because of the difficulty of Russian grammar, I tend to understand Japanese grammar better than I did before. Thank goodness for Japanese conjugation.
I love こと for some reason and always have. Feels so good to say in sentences like 「の」を使うことが好きじゃない。Favourite nominaliser for sure
Particles function very similarly to cases in a lot of situations.
食道 (しょくどう) which means esophagus
ah that’s amazing.
I like words like 地理 (geography) (lit. “land-reason”) and 心理 (psychology) (lit. “feeling-reason”)
There’s just something about the word being “the reason for the land/earth” that I love.
I really like 時々
It sounds kinda cute, doesn’t it?
Favorite grammar point has to be adding ~んだけど at the end of every sentence lol. I like how it rolls of the tongue
As for kanji I really like 君 for some reason
I thought it was cute that 凸 means convex, 凹 means concave, and 凸凹 (or 凹凸) means uneven.
Yeah, but you don’t have to decline the noun in Japanese haha.