What are some really tough words (or group of words) in Japanese to learn?

I think I’ve found the toughest word I’ve seen yet,

tekitaitekibaishu 敵対的買収 which means “hostile takeover” in a business sense.

Since this is not even a rare word, it sort of made me realize perhaps the vocabs I’ve seen so far are too easy.

I’m curious if there are common words (or group of words) that are even harder than this.

4 comments
  1. >tekitaitekibaishu 敵対的買収 which means “hostile takeover”

    Does this not break down rather nicely? “hostility” + “adjective-suffix” + “buyout”.

    — 敵対: “hostility”, made up of 2 kanji that both by themselves are very high frequency words, meaning “opponent” and “versus”. Both use exactly the reading you would expect.

    — 的: standard suffix to turn a noun into an adjective, seen everywhere.

    — 買収: “buyout”, the first kanji means “buy” and is pronounced バイ(bai) here. I mean, this is almost as if they had english learners in mind when they came up with it 😉

  2. One I learnt recently is:
    鳩が豆鉄砲を食ったよう

    はと が まめでっぽう を くった よう

    Which means “wide-eyed shock”
    Or in jp:
    突然のことにびっくりして目めを丸まるくしているさま。

  3. Group of words? Very broadly, the ones pertaining to subjects I don’t personally give a damn about, but might be fair game on something like the JLPT.

Leave a Reply
You May Also Like