Most recent Japanese word you've learned?

I don’t know why I had never run into this in Japanese, especially considering how much we discuss it here, but

記憶術 (きおくじゅつ) mnemonic

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相性あいしょう - affinity; compatibility
事態 じたい - situation; (present) state of affairs; circumstances
未消化 みしょうか - undigested (food); unfulfilled (orders); unused (funds)
付与 ふよ - grant; allowance; endowment; bestowal; assignment; conferment
賞与 しょうよ - bonus; reward; prize
分配 ぶんぱい - division; splitting; sharing; distribution; dissemination; allocation
ぬし - borrower; debtor; tenant; lessee; renter
共益費 きょうえきひ - monthly fee for common areas of an apartment building (lighting, etc.); condo fees
管理費かんりひ - administration costs; administrative expenses; management costs;

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だて
伊達メガネ

Fashion glasses, any non prescription glasses, empty frames, and I think sunglasses too.

退屈 (たいくつ — boredom, boring)

from this terrific music video :slight_smile:

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image
I’m used to jukugo words whose meanings don’t don’t relate to the kanji at all being abstract like some of the ones for “circumstance”, but for some reason when it’s a straight up noun it just feels plain silly.

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The ancient vegetable that this name was originally associated with was roughly shaped like a stick-figure, which doesn’t really translate over to the modern carrots of today. So that’s where 人 comes from.

参 is used because it is simpler to write than 蔘, the original kanji that used to be used. Its meaning was just a specific group of plants. So this was the one that was kinda human shaped in that group. That’s all.

Also, really the only times where the kanji completely come out of left field is when they are pure ateji. I can’t really think of one for “circumstance” where the meanings aren’t related to the compound word.

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Most recent words for me:

膨らむ (ふくらむ)
to expand (intransitive); to get big; to become inflated

膨らます (ふくらます)
to expand (transitive); to inflate; to make swell

Hmm, I was under the impression that it came directly from ginseng*, which does looks like a sort of Lovecraftian carrot-person.
Was there some third vegetable adding tot he confusion?

As a complete aside: The Yu-Gi-Oh! card にん人 didn’t really translate well, so they had to change it to World Carrotweight Champion.

*Edit: Or rather, that it was cognate with ginseng, since the English word apparently comes from Korean and the Japanese word from Chinese. Still, they probably come from … the same roots.

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The explanations I’ve read all use にんじん in their names of the predecessor vegetables somewhere, and I didn’t look for anything about it in English, but my guess is that no matter what it was, it wouldn’t look exactly like the modern form of something, because of how much we are able to shape and change things with selective breeding.

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That does make a lot of sense. Even today, wild carrots can vary quite a lot from their cultivated cousins.

公 (おおやけ) public

It never ceases to amaze me how many words written with simple kanji I still don’t know.

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Started playing this crime drama game and picking up a bunch of words from that.
威嚇射撃(いかくしゃげき)- warning shot
ガサ入れ(がさいれ)- search of the premises
半グレ(はんぐれ)- group of criminals who don’t belong to a criminal organization

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What game?

It’s a mobile otome game called スタンドマイヒーローズ

Today I saw a bunch of comments on a YouTube video saying おめ as short for おめでとう.

I bring this up because おめ didn’t show up as meaning “congrats” in the dictionaries I checked. It’s just sunk in that proper vocabulary isn’t enough, and I’m also going to have to learn a bunch of slang I can’t just look up. Yay.

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I have been seeing that one a lot lately! akeome, short for shinnen akemashite omedetou

地方 - ち・ほう - Region
Acquired whilst playing Pokemon Sun. The アローラ地方 appears a lot.

Additionally, I knew the vocabulary beforehand, but I only kind of knew the kanji for 引っ越し (ひっこし), and I definitely didn’t know that it could be written 引越し.

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玉ねぎ is an interesting word - it translates literally as ball spring onion, even though it just means onion.

It illustrates how Japanese seems to use the spring onion (ネギ) as the representative member of the Allium genus, while English uses the onion. Thus, translating onion to Japanese and then back-translating literally gives you a longer word than you started out with.
I’m expressing this really badly, but hopefully the meaning carries over.

There is also the word 長ネギ (“long ネギ”) for for spring onion, but I believe it’s less common.


More on-topic: I think the latest word I learned was probably 跳馬 (ちょうば) - vaulting horse.
Not sure I’ll be committing it to memory, though.

I looked it up because it seems to be a more common term for 木馬 (もくば) … but 木馬 is also a torture device - a wooden horse - so I’ll probably remember that one.

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It does. Really interesting fact, thanks for pointing it out!

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千仞: great depth, bottomless. Apparently it can also be written 千尋, but I like the other option more.

From 新世界より (the novel)

You’re reading 新世界より? How’s that going?

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