How about the English word skosh, from 少し? Or emoji 絵文字? Or karaoke coming from 空 (kara, empty) オーケストラ (orchestra).
There aren’t many words like that, I guess.
I figured you just meant reading about etymology in Japanese generally, not how it relates to English, or another language. I have found many fascinating stories of how modern words came to mean what they mean, but it’s true that usually it’s not going to relate to English.
Now, see, Russian smacks you in the face for no reason other than “screw you, I’m the Russian language”. There’s two plurals, one for 2-4/12-14/22-24/… and another for 5-10/15-20 and I probably got that wrong.
I’m many years out from my Russian studies, but it’s a lot easier than you’re making it sound. If you have one thing, that thing is singular nominative. “один человек/One Person” If you’re numbering things – like “two people” – the thing you’re counting takes the genitive case: think “два человека/two of person.”
Once you get to five, you stop taking the singular genitive and start counting everything as plural genitive: “семь людей/seven of people.” You keep going with the plural genitive forever.
It’s weird, but it’s one of the easier things to get used to in Russian. From what I’ve seen so far – and it’s not much – Japanese grammar is a little bit more approachable than Russian is. The main difficulty is having to learn so many Kanji just to get to basic literacy.
The (hopefully-full) rules for Russian counting:
| Number | Noun form |
|---|---|
| 1 or last digit is 1 | Nominative singular |
| from 2 to 4 or last digit is from 2 to 4 | Genitive singular |
| 0 and from 5 to 9 or last digit is 0 or from 5 to 9 | Genitive plural |
| from 11 to 20 | Genitive plural |
So, not, you don’t keep going with the plural genitive forever. Not to mention the fact that converting between the three noun forms is an absolute guess, and it gets weird fast.
As I explained - yes, Kanji is hard, but at least I can sorta understand why it has to be hard (e.g. those homophones). Russian counting just seems needlessly complex.
Wait what happens at 10
I never thought of it this way, this is awesome. Thank you.
Genitive plural (ends on 0). I actually never realized that about Russian for about 15 years until I had to program a response text based on a number and saw how needlessly complicated it is.
Can we just agree that numbers are always fun. Be it the mathematics in French used to say numbers like 96 or the “wrong” order in German if pronouncing the “ones” before the “tens”.
And a lot of them are not exactly common. Wanikani allows a romanized meaning for the ones it teaches, but I’d never heard of skosh, futon, kabuki or yokai before, so that really didn’t help 
(even the spellchecker here doesn’t like skosh and yokai).
But for emoji, karaoke, ninja and of course the foods (sushi, sashimi, edamame, tofu, umeboshi, etc)
it’s exciting to learn the kanji and thereby the underlying meanings (or in the case of sushi just the seemingly random pictograms).
Personally I love how Japanese just binds concepts/words together to form new words - it’s very similar to word chaining in Dutch or German, so it feels like home to me.
But, but, you can’t just say 妖怪 are some random old monsters. Only Yokai are Yokai. Pokémon aren’t Yokai (well, some are kind of), monsters you fight in other games usually aren’t Youkai either. They’re 魔物 or 化け物 or モンスター. That’s a very important distinction (for nerds).
In Danish, 50 is (3 - 0.5) * 20 (halvtreds), 70 is (4 - 0.5) * 20 (halvfjerds), and 90 is (5 - 0.5) * 20 (halvfems).
Danish has quite the reputation as being very hard to learn here in Germany.
This is like on another level haha 
To be fair, some not very well educated Russians have trouble with those, especially the declension of numbers (like these, rightfully put in the last lessons for being complicated, https://learnrussian.rt.com/grammar-tables/declension-of-cardinal-numbers-part-1/).
Same with changing the stress in some words, it’s one of the questions on the Russian language exam after 11th grade, and a lot of people have trouble with that one xD Don’t make me talk about избалованный and баловать, almost no one even says them in the “correct” way xD
I dont think thats the case just in germany (But a little surprising with danish being a germanic language AND a local neighbour)
German isnt really too hard to make sense of from a danish perspective, hell some danes have an easier time understanding german than swedish.
I guess danes just sorta won the language lottery (and lost it at the same time due to its limited use)
I hate how stressed syllables in Russian often don’t seem to follow a particular rule and must be studied case-by-case, yet you’re considered “uneducated” if you get them wrong. Reminds me of weird reading exceptions like 一昨日.
As for избалованный and баловать, surely these aren’t the worst examples you could think of? Stuff like “ложить” or “в течении” [часа] come to mind.
Well, I think you won it in a way, because you all speak such great English.
Germany has a huge dubbing industry and video games almost always get German translations too. Immersion into English is possible, but not needed, so many speak English not that well or not at all.
I speak 5 different languages of which 4 are Asian and the other is English and I have noticed that there is a certain flowery/poetic element in all of the Asian languages I know as compared to English or the Romance languages I tried to learn (Spanish/Italian). Dunno what to call it or how to exactly put my finger on it, though.
Those are the examples that I think don’t really need to be said in a “correct” way. Russian constantly changes, I think more than any other language I’ve learned at this point, so words like творог have 2 accepted stresses and I don’t remember which one I was saying more often before studying for the exam xD
Ложить and в течении (or звОнит) are the ones that are considered absolutely wrong imo, same with ихний please burn that word, it should not exist. Words like туннель and тоннель technically have a difference, but not really and both are correct. Or свёкла is also usually pronounced “incorrectly”, but who knows when that way is gonna be added to the dictionaries xD
I’m not that far in the Japanese study yet, but I do agree with the ‘ahhh’ feeling of having no articles, purals, cases. As a Dutch speaker, I do think English phonetically is fine. French however…
Russian and Polish are probably similiar technically. I tried learning Polish because I’m half Polish, but all the different cases just made me cry. Not to mention all the tonguebreaker sj, sh, sz, sw… sounds. 
Japanese and Finnish are phonetically the best languages out there. They both sound most melodic to me too.
Maybe this is subjective but it’s also quite pretty in how it sounds and flows
Rather than Polish being close to Russian, I feel like Ukrainian is more like a bastard child of the two, and learning it seems to get you halfway there in both the others. There are also some funny words like Polish “zapomniałem” (forgot) vs Russian “запомнил” [zapomnil] (remembered) that sound almost identical but have opposite meanings.
I also noticed that while Japanese largely stands out from any other languages I’ve come across (maybe except tagalog), it still has some elements that you intuitively understand before ever learning it, like the --か ending indicating a question or request for confirmation just by the sound of it.
