Most recent Japanese word you've learned?

自爆
I don’t know if 弾丸 has to be with the anime title but it helped me memorize it.

り - night fishing

感想 is one of my favorites. It’s used a lot at the end of manga, as in “Please tell us your impressions.” My mnemotic for it is “can so.”

I learned a big girl word yesterday, 差別 (さべつ) Discrimination. Now I can accuse people of 外国人差別 if I’m ever microaggressed. But I won’t.

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最奥 − deep inside, innermost

By this point, I’m well acquainted with 最, but this kanji was new to me.

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地獄 (じごく) - Hell

I’m currently reading Japanese Stories for Language Learners by Eriko Sato and Anne McNulty. There are five short stories in it, two traditional tales plus three by 20th Century authors. The word is from Kumo no Ito (The Spider’s Thread) by Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927), a tale about Buddha and how he helps a sinner escape from hell by letting a spider’s web reach down into the Lake of Blood.

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I learned this word from a haiku by Kobayashi Issa. It’s one of my favourite haiku I’ve ever read and it’s quite easy for the learner to understand in terms of structure and vocabulary:

世の中は地獄の上の花見かな

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シャープペンシル
The word sharp pencil comes from the company that created it: Sharp Corporation. His founder Mr. Hayakawa created a kind of pencil Named “Ever Sharp”:open_mouth::exploding_head:

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I came across 導かれる (みちびかれ)while reading Sailor Moon, and immediately thought, hmmm…I have heard this word before - in the Japanese version of the Sailor Moon theme song!

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ユーマ (U.M.A.): the abbreviated form of Unidentified Mysterious Animal, or cryptid. The much longer alternative is 未確認生物(みかくにんせいぶつ) which means unconfirmed animal.

Edit: fixed reading

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Shouldn’t that be みかくにんせいぶつ? :slight_smile:

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黄金比 (おうごんひ) golden ratio!

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両親。

Not on Wanikani, but the separate Kanji are and they’re easy to figure out… Both+parents… Still means parents :joy:

To be fair, 親 can be just one parent or more, whereas 両親 is explicitly both. So they’re not always interchangeable.

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lol at myself from 10 months ago.

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簡単 - かんたん - easy/simple

read in the ドラえもん grammar book 文法力がつく

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象る/形どる/形取る・かたどるto model on; to represent; to make in the shape of

I’m translating some texts about less “standardized” kami venerated at various shrines (such as local water and land deities), and came across this sentence (well, actually just a clause in a much longer sentence):

手水鉢の石彫や吐水口は龍を形どったものが多い。

In such things as the carvings on the washbasins and on the water spouts, there are many depictions of dragons.

(my own translation; take with grains of salt)

It seems the thing imitated can be marked either by を, as in the sentence above, or by に, as in this example sentence from Jisho.org:

神は自らにかたどって人を創造された。
“God created man in his own image.”

As hinted by the spelling 形取る, the かた in this word is perhaps the same as the かた in 形, and どる a rendaku’d 取る.

It might be worth noting that the kanji used in the “primary” spelling isn’t 像 (statue) as one might expect, but rather 象 (elephant).
In Chinese, the hanzi 象 does have a second meaning of “depiction” or “outline” (presumably due to phonetic borrowing or by a simplification of 像), and it seems this also shows up in a number of Japanese words.

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I think its cool to go back and see your progress like that lmao

I learned recently (from Hello Talk)
味 - Flavor
相性 - Chemistry? Like getting along/compatible with someone/something.

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ほらほら

Listen!

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縁結び・えんむすびmarriage; tying the knot; matchmaking

I saw this word in a text about the 恋の水神社. Unfortunately, when I first saw the word, it was in a picture, and so rather than copy-paste it I just wrote what I saw: 結び (note the 氺/𧰨).

There were actually several search results (probably jokes and misspellings) which seemed to indicate that this was correct, so so now I’m afraid that I’m going to have a hard time getting it out of my head :stuck_out_tongue:

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I think you meant ほらほら.