グレー、 ペット、スーツケース、チョコラート、パスタ、プール、コーヒー、ポスト、ライオン、アイスクリーム、ミルク、 etc. etc.
As a begginer, the more I learn, the more I feel Japanese is too English-like. I read they speak like this to sound “cooler” (?), but sometimes I fear important terms are being replaced with English words in my lessons, and that it could harm my progress.
Should I start looking for originally Japanese words or this is just how things are?
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I think that some teachers believe that introducing a lot of English loanwords early on somehow makes Japanese easier or less scary or something. What is the source of your current lessons? Either way, the above words are indeed all common words (except for チョコラート), so eventually you will need to learn them anyway.
Anyone learning Japanese is also going to have those terms in their vocab, so I don’t think it’s a problem with your vocabulary specifically. If you’re planning to read a lot of books or other content from before the time when these terms were widely adopted, you’ll probably want to learn other ways these things were referred to, but the terms you listed are common in modern Japanese language.
If you’re worried about the Anglicization/Westernization of the Japanese language, that’s a separate issue (and one probably best left to Japan and it’s people).
If you’re worried you’re not learning authentic Japanese, maybe find a native speaker to practice with.
Many words will be derived from English for the western version of something and the Japanese word will refer to the Japanese version. For example, hotel vs ryokan, bed vs futon, toilet vs benjo, etc.
It’s not troublesome. However, teaching many English words early on while shying away from actual Japanese and especially kanji is one of my main gripes with beginner textbooks. It’s just plain inefficient because those English words can be acquired later on almost effortlessly. Japanese vocabulary and kanji, on the other hand, need a lot of time to sink in
This is just how things are. Modern Japanese includes a lot of loan words, and in many cases the loan word is far more common than the equivalent native word (or there just isn’t an equivalent native word). It is essential to speaking Japanese, and to understanding spoken Japanese, to have an extensive knowledge of loan words from English and other languages, as well as in some cases the ways in which their Japanese meaning differs from their English/other language meaning.
Japanese is the sum of many traditions, so its vocabulary is quite mixed. There are the real native japanese words, overall for natural things like mountain, river, heart and so on. Then there’s the chinese words, which are like 60% of the vocabulary. They brought it within the chinese culture. Now Japan acquired western culture, so it’s full of english, but also french (piero for clown) and so on. It’s pretty cool actually.
English loan words are Japanese words.
>As a begginer, the more I learn, the more I feel Japanese is too English-like.
That feeling won’t last long, you’re gonna miss these easy to read and remember loan words once you reach the intermediate level.
I don’t see any English words there, I see Japanese words that are loan words from English.
Of all of those you listed, only グレー and ミルク have native Japanese equivalents, but they don’t mean precisely the same thing necessarily as the loan words (and for ミルク, you have not only the native word ちち but also the Chinese loan 牛乳)
All of these words are used by Japanese people not to sound cool, but because those are the standard Japanese words for those things.
You know, I wondered the same thing. I just got back from my first trip to japan 2 weeks ago though and I have to say, the loan words were everywhere. With my limited Japanese, it was super super helpful.
A slightly off topic note, I would recommend learning the katakana versions of drugs you commonly take, like acetaminophen. I had some real aches and pains from falling down some stairs a few days prior to my trip and, upon landing in japan, discovered that there was English on almost everything.. only not on things like medications. ^,^;; Like there would be full english on the sides of my coffee but not on anything that matters. lol So yes, just thought I’d throw that in there since I’ve never seen that recommendation on any guide…
I mean… English is 80% loanwords, but most of them you wouldn’t think of them as such. You wouldn’t think of “beef” or “academy” or “cookie” or “trek” or “berserk” as loanwords. I would guess it’s a little more apparent to Japanese people thanks to katakana and their relative scarcity.
Point being, if somebody were to insist on trying to find the truly “English” word for “cow meat,” they’d likely struggle quite a bit *and* none of us would know what they were talking about anyways. Even more so if they tried to find an equivalent for a modern loanword like tsunami (no, tidal waves are not the same).
What you should probably invest more time in other ways to learn the language as well, I like to take a shotgun approach and do multiple things at a time, not just one specific app or textbook
The best thing you can do for yourself is learn the kanji, with onyomi and kunyomi pronounciations
You’ll also want to identify as many patterns as possible, the way Japanese and English conjugate are different, and learning that conjugation pattern is really gonna change things up for you
Things that I was studying early on and still do:
Kanji ( Onyomi, Kunyomi, meanings, and particles )
Pitch accent is crucial this early on too, like the verbal form of kanji
Verb and Adjective conjugation patterns
N5 Vocab list
Lots of words are written and sound the same if you don’t know the pitch accent and only use hiragana, “bridge, chopsticks, leg”, as an example of things that are either written the same or sound the same that could be immediately identifiable with proper knowledge of pitch accent, kanji, and situational context
Kanji is a long process, but it’s so worth while when you start recognizing kanji and their sounds and seeing them in the context, I first started getting excited when I would know what the meaning is before knowing the word, and that kinda felt counter productive at first, but now I can sound the kanji ( context of the sentence can tell you where it’s onyomi or kunyomi, and experience will help seal it in if it’s got multiple readings, only the most common kanji have the most varied meanings, so you really shouldn’t let multiple pronunciation thing scare you, because those words end up being so common you kinda forget the multiple pronunciation part
I personally don’t see nouns as particularly interesting to study, they’re going to be the most varied of words, and you can learn those in context as long as you know what the rest of the sentence is saying
I think once you get into the grammatical side of it, you’re first going to get thrown off by how different it is always putting a verb last in the sentence, and trying to figure out how to word things, and then you’ll kinda realize that subtracting the nuance and sticking directly to word for word translations that it’ll all sound kinda like baby talk
I remember some statistic somewhere, it’s somewhere close to 25% of modern Japanese has loan words. So don’t feel too bad.
[Japanese in 10 Years](https://youtu.be/pW4AiEqKGto) by Dogen
Everyone else has already weighed in on the topic so I just wanted to correct a few things for common usage: I use 灰色 rather than グレー, チョコ rather than チョコレート but it depends on context, アイス is more common than アイスクリーム (it could also be called ソフトクリーム depending on the type), 牛乳 rather than ミルク
Most of these things originates from other countries, like パスタ and コーヒー。Naturally as foreign words, these types of words required only Katakana to speak.
Milk does have a Japanese word: 牛乳, however it’s said like milk of a cow, not the best way to say milk, since you wouldn’t go up to a store clerk and ask for milk of a cow. You could, but the clerk would look at you funny. So ミルク is the preferred option.
Point is, Japanese have plenty of nouns which are Kanji or Hiragana, like 車, 病院 or 猿。So much so, that it’s its own topic. So when the language gives you a free pass in learning a new noun without the rigamarole of radicals and pneumonics, don’t look the gift horse in the mouth and take the free lesson. You’ll be glad you did.
It’s not to sound cool it just shows how the language has evolved through history. Don’t make the classic English speaker mistake to think it’s all English either. There’s a fair bit of German, French and Portuguese in there too.
All of those words are Japanese words 🙂 it’s as simple as that imo
Those are all Japanese words, just like how “ninja”, “tsunami”, and “karate” are English words. Don’t worry about it.
Incidentally, this becomes a topic of discussion every few years on NHK.
Does anybody know why this guy is using a bunch of fancy French and Latin words like *replace, important, progress* and *lesson* in his English sentences?
The only problem is that you spelled several of those wrong.
Best thing you can do is write a letter to Kishida.
Yes. It means you haven’t gotten a swift kick to the balls with vocabulary. By the time you hit N4 levels of ability, you’ll get your confidence up to deep dive into other things and then you’ll see a wall of text in mostly Kanji of N1 and N2 stuff and it will demoralize you.
その日に楽しみにしてるぜーへへへへwww
There’s indeed a lot of loan words, but it could also be said that they may appear more often for beginners due to them being more beginner-friendly. Some of those words have normal Japanese equivalents, e.g.:
灰色（はいいろ): Gray
獅子（しし): Lion
牛乳（ぎゅうにゅう): Milk
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using loan words — the more vocab you have, the more sentences you can make, after all. Do keep in mind though that not every English word is accepted as a katakana word (i.e. learn which English words are actually used in Japan).
I think it’s also worth noting that learning katakana words has value because not all of them are as straight-forward as the ones you listed (e.g. バイク: Motorcycle (not bicycle), etc.).
Those textbooks seem to go in order of daily life use words. I also remember how they presented vocabulary which is why I could never take them seriously for vocab in general.
I got more out of setting all my devices to Japanese (like my ps3 at the time) since there’s still a ton of katakana loan words but you’ll be granted immediate access to how they’re used in context by doing this
Your phone could work too