I had a roommate once that was American but fluent in Japanese. He had spent a few years abroad.
He walked out into the living room and said やった (yatta), and began to serve himself lunch. “Roommate?” I asked, “What does yatta mean? I’ve heard it in a lot of anime, but I don’t know how normal people actually use it or how to translate it.”
“It’s what you say when the rice is done.”
Me: “Right, but how would you translate it to English?”
At this point, his brain checked for updates, shut down and relaunched, after which he hesitatingly said, “It’s.. uh… it’s what you say when the rice is done.”
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What’s your word or phrase that was my roommate’s yatta? Something you’re sure you know, but you could never tell someone what it means.
4 comments
It is a word to express joy when things go well. I am not an English speaker, so I’m not sure if this is natural, but if I had to translate it, I would say “Yes!”, “Sweet!” or “Hooray!”
There are a lot of phrases, especially greetings/あいさつ, in Japanese that I don’t think have a direct/easy translation to English because we don’t use as many set phrases in English.
* よろしくお願いします this one is context-based. It can mean let’s work well together or like please do the thing we agreed on.
* お世話になります thanks for taking care of me,
That yatta can be **interpretated** as a “finally!!!” but mixed with emotion and eagerness.
And more than phrases the paeticles are the ones that makes japanese expresions being unique. You have to be immersed in the language and see how they’re used for you to understand them in japanses never EVER in English.
When you’re learning japanese you have to forget about your mother tongue and learn like when you were a baby. If you keep trying to guess the inexistent translation of japanese in the english language you will never pass over that eternal gap.
And my word would be 無有 it’s like “exist-not exist” but that sound, muyuu enclose that concept into a word
This post is so funny to me “its …uh ..its what you say when the rice is done..” he sounds so funny😭