Japanese Onomatopoeia

By Maki Hayasaka

Onomatopoeia is an important part of everyday Japanese, for both children and adults alike. For anyone aiming to master the language or to communicate like a native speaker, a good understanding of these lively and nuanced phrases is essential. To help you along, Japanese Onomatopoeia is a Japanese–English dictionary that provides a thorough listing of each expression in rōmaji and its conventional form in either hiragana or katakana.

Both giongo (“sound” words) and gitaigo (mimetic words) are covered in detail, with the full range of each word’s meanings listed for easy reference and study. This makes it a valuable resource for anyone with an interest in reading, writing, or speaking Japanese, and it will boost your studies that extra mile towards natural fluency.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maki Hayasaka
• Release date: Nov 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463926956

Maki Hayasaka

Maki Hayasaka is a sociolinguist and has worked in Japanese studies for nearly two decades. Her focus as a language researcher has been on the relationship between English and Japanese, and how native speakers of one language can best learn the other.

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Japanese Onomatopoeia

Maki Hayasaka

First published 2019

Publication © Rockwaller Books 2019

Text © Maki Hayasaka 2019

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Publisher: Rockwaller Books

Editor: Dane Wallace

Proofreader: Aika Shiraishi

Cover design: Emma Grey

Rockwallerbooks.com

@RockwallerBooks

ISBN: 9780463926956

Distributed by Smashwords

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Acknowledgments

My deepest gratitude to my friends and family.

Your patience and support mean the world to me.

And to my students: thank you for making

teaching Japanese so much fun!

これからも頑張りましょう!

Contents

Introduction

Dictionary

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Books by Maki Hayasaka

Introduction

Many learners of Japanese are surprised by just how important onomatopoeia is to gaining a natural command of the language. This is because sound words in most other languages are usually only used in very specific contexts. In English, for example, written onomatopoeia is generally restricted to comic books, where they provide sound effects to various actions, such as bonk for someone getting knocked on the head, or pow for the impact of a strong punch.

In a similar way, spoken onomatopoeia in English is mostly limited to baby talk, as a way of engaging young children with fun sounds that compensate for their limited vocabulary. The most common examples of this are the different sounds that animals make, such as woof for a dog, meow for a cat, and moo for a cow. There are scores of these, all of which children learn naturally as they grow up as being a normal part of their language. Yet it’s interesting that these same children quickly learn to outgrow this expressive part of their vocabulary, since it’s broadly considered to be childish at best and inappropriate for regular speech or writing.

This, however, isn’t the case in Japanese. Students of the language quickly come to see how onomatopoeia plays a very large and important role in ordinary Japanese speech, for both children and adults alike. From literary novels to adults talking business, you can expect to encounter a healthy dose of onomatopoeia, just as you would other parts of speech like adjectives and adverbs. This enables people to express themselves in descriptively conceptual ways that would otherwise be impossible.

What is important to note is that Japanese onomatopoeia comes in two main categories. These are known as giongo and gitaigo, and understanding the differences between them will help learners to better grasp their purpose and value in natural Japanese.

In the case of giongo, these are words that represent or imitate a particular sound. This is what we usually think of when we refer to onomatopoeia in English. Phrases like splish-splash (the sound of splashing water) and cock-a-doodle-doo (the cry of a rooster) are direct imitations of how English speakers express those real-world sounds. Naturally, every culture has its own impression of what these sounds are like. In Japanese, cock-a-doodle-doo is rather conveyed as kokekokkou, while beep is normally represented as bii.

The second category, gitaigo, is a little different. Unlike the sound words above, gitaigo rather deals with mimesis: words that represent things that don’t actually make a sound. For example, a splitting headache can be described with the phrase gingin, while the act of staring fixedly at something or someone can be conveyed with jii. This form of onomatopoeia gives people the ability to express the appearance, concept, or psychology of something in a succinct and clearly understood way. This is a major reason why onomatopoeia is such an indispensable