J-List is a wonderful toybox of things from Japan - come see
Every time you don't click over to J-List, God kills a kitten

The personal log of Peter Payne, owner of JLIST.com, the home of "wacky things from Japan"

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Mixing Japanese and English Grammer

Because the Japanese generally study six years of English during junior high and high school, there's a tendency for English vocabulary and grammar to "leak" into the Japanese language, resulting in some interesting new creations. In my last update I wrote that my wife is a shikaku getter or a person who loves to "get" random qualifications, like her forklift operator's license. The word "getter" (one who gets something) doesn't exist in English, yet it's quite a logical idea once you get around the mental lock your brain tries to impose on nonsensical words. Often the English-er suffix added to Japanese words to imply "a person who likes something," like mayoler meaning a person who likes mayonnaise a lot, or tsunderer, which would be a word for a person who loves tsundere anime characters. The Japanese will often take the "tic" ending of words like "romantic" and attach it to new words, resulting in new slang creations like manga-chikku (as "tic" is pronounced in Japanese, for phonetic reasons), meaning "just like something out of a manga story."

The Japanese word for someone who loves mayonnaise is mayoler.

4 Comments:

Blogger Mockingbird said...

The word getter does exist in English, at least in combinations. Someone who is energetic is a go-getter. An administrative assistant is a "getter-up". A stallion that has been successfully put out to stud is a foal-getter, though in this combination getter means "begetter", not "acquirer."

10:02 PM

 
Blogger markm said...

Re: -tic ... We do something similar in English, borrowing the French -esque ending to mean "-like". E.g. "Capraesque".

12:24 AM

 
Blogger Peter in Japan said...

Ah yes, go-getter, didn't think about that.

Markm, yes, we use "esque" in English in silly situations too. I guess everyone likes to borrow/mangle someone's language.

12:28 AM

 
Blogger The Envoy said...

I am a mayoler too.

11:10 AM

 

Post a Comment

<< Home

 


,