I started learning Japanese seriously last October, and despite passing N2 in July the thing that I struggle with the most in day to day reading is still all the Katakana 外来語. Some of those are difficult at first but once you learn it, they aren’t too unreasonable to remember and use. For example at first I was completely dumbfounded by the word ベビーカー、but it’s easy to remember “babycar” means “stroller” in Japanese afterwards.
Then there are all these technical words they use in order to sound trendy/cool. For example I was reading a new press release by Mazda: https://car.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1536685.html
Like…sure I can deal with deciphering words like フィードバック (feedback) or ロードスター (roadster), but I am completely blown away at their marketing department naming a new color エアログレーメタリック, which after reading it out loud like an idiot for 30 seconds, I understood it meaning Aero Gray Metallic.
That’s not even mentioning technical words like ステアリングラック (Steering Rack), or the worst offender I found ダイナミック・スタビリティ・コントロール, which is Dainamikku sutabiriti kontorōru, or in English, Dynamic Stability Control.
Do the average Japanese consumer understand what エアログレーメタリック actually mean? Do they know メタリック means 金属? Or do they just say it out loud to sound cool without understanding the meaning behind the words?
**Edit**: It’s also interesting sometimes these words are used precisely *because* they aren’t well understood by native speakers, thus displaying some sort of intellectual superiority of the user. The best example is this poster I saw: https://imgur.com/a/wLbDSUi
アントレプレナーシップ (entrepreneurship, which of course is a loanword in English as well) is a loanword that is not understood by a single native Japanese person I’ve shown it to, and the poster plays on that fact to display some sort of intellectual sophistication.
**Edit 2**: For people who say “This happens all the time in other languages”, I’d like to point out that **18%** of all Japanese vocabulary are loanwords, with most of them introduced within the last 100 years (and many of them last 30 years). If you know of another major language with this kind of pace for loanwords adoption, please kindly share since I’m genuinely curious.
In fact, for the people who are making the argument “If some native Japanese people use them, then they are authentic natural Japanese”, I’d like to ask them if they consider words like “Kawaii” or “Senpai” or “Moe” to be “authentic natural English”, because I think we all know English speakers who have adopted them in conversation as well XD
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That’s actually an interesting question, and I would imagine many don’t simply because many english speakers don’t know the origins of their loan words.
For example, I’m sure alot of people don’t know that telephone comes from the Greek words meaning far and sound. Or that terminal comes from the Latin word meaning end.
IMO, just like anything technical, the people who are interested in a given subject know what the different technical terms mean.
I asked my Japanese wife and she didn’t know what that color meant and the stability control word.
The relationship between a word and its meaning is arbitrary, and therefore the relationship of a meaning to its etymology is also arbitrary. Just because a word is a loan word doesn’t mean that it isn’t a fully formed, complete and natural Japanese word.
What that means in practice is that ステアリングラック does not mean ‘steering rack’, it just means ステアリングラック. It is only ‘steering rack’ when translated into English. It just so happens that the translation and the etymology of the word overlap in this case, which makes us feel like they’re more related than they really are.
The question then is one of ‘are Japanese people aware of the etymologies of the words they use’. To which, I would say very likely no.
Does that make sense? Hope I’m expressing it ok.
The stability control thing and the color you listed don’t seem like well established loan words. It’s just what some people in the marketing thought sounded cool. So I wouldn’t think these terms are necessarily easy to understand for everyone. That being said, ダイナミック、コントロール and メタリック by themselves are definetly established as loanwords in Japanese, they wouldn’t sound like total gibberish either.
Some of these words are only used in very specific fields, so I don’t think many Japanese people understand all of them. I’m a native Japanese speaker, but I don’t understand some of them. They simply transliterate English words into Japanese using katakana, which doesn’t always make sense.
For example, ‘ソフトトップカラー’ seems to suggest that certain parts of the car are colored, but I’m not sure exactly what it refers to. It’s derived from the English words ‘soft-top-color,’ but it still confuses me. I tried searching online, and I could only find articles related to Mazda cars, so it appears to be a new Katakana loanword coined by Mazda.
‘リトラクタブルハードトップ’ is also challenging to understand, and most of the articles I found on Google are primarily related to Mazda cars.
It’s quite strange, but I found that the English article was much easier to understand than the one in Japanese.
https://www.mazdausa.com/vehicles/mx-5-miata
https://www.mazdausa.com/vehicles/mx-5-miata-rf
For complicated words like the エアログレーメタリック, it’s the same as when they like to use English as description for products in other countries. If you know English, you can understand it, otherwise you probably don’t.
llj moment
A friend of mine once told me that japanese people will one day exclusively use English vocabulary written in kana without speaking truly in English. Maybe something like how some Indians use their own version of English as a first language in some parts of India.
As in, if you said the words in actual English, would they understand the words? No. Most would not. They know the Japanese word (as in: the katakana “cool” term) but not by the actual English pronunciation.
Those are just transcriptions. Technical terms and paint color names are usually just katakanized. It’s not to make them sound cool and they don’t say them out loud to sound cool.
Mazda’s color names are used globally. Whether it’s in Japan, Germany or Thailand, the color is called Aero Grey Metallic. And I’m very sure that most of their Japanese customers understand the meaning well. They are not uncommon words at all.
By the way, Mazda Europe gives some of their models [Japanese names](https://www.mazda.de/modelle/mazda2/homura_and_homura_aka/#).
I’m amazed you figured out aero grey metallic…
Maybe just ask them: r/AskAJapanese 😀
After my experience here in Germany people don’t always understand English loanwords or product names but it doesn’t matter as they just use them as they are without thinking about the original meaning. A funny example would be a drink called Sunkist which is a play of words with „sun kissed“ but nobody knows that and everybody pronounces this word extremely German and not at all in an English manner. I guess it’s very similar with all the katakana loanwords in Japan. Especially if you look how they shorten everything so that the origin is nearly unrecognizable anymore (e.g. パソコン or リモコン).
And the PR and advertising bullshit like in your car example is just treated with 右の耳から左の耳. 😀
That reminds me, in anime shows when someone says a special move like “ファイアーブレイドor whatever in katakana, do they actually know what they are saying?
Or is it random gibberish like Harry Potter spells to them?
The answer is pretty much ‘no’. Some people understand more than others, some words are just confusing and they don’t know what it really means.
Other words are super common and most people know and other common words are different to what they meant originally and the Japanese use the incorrect understanding collectively.
And other words are mostly well understood.
Your examples you gave, imo the average Japanese person wouldn’t understand. An enthusiast or an educated person might.
A lot of technical fields are done in both Japanese/ English like medicine for eg. And programming. So they’ll be able to understand words like that but the consumer, probs not.
It really depends on the person. A young urbanites will generally know (and use) more katakana words than a middle aged person in the inaka. Using a bunch of katakana words (especially business related ones) is an aspect of the 港区男子 stereotype. A 20 something in Tokyo may have a ミーティング on their schedule where their parents have an 打ち合わせ
I used to live in a rural area and asked an older coworker for フィードバック and got mass confusion in return. I totally blanked on synonyms and a coworker in their 30s had to bridge the generation gap for us
I still don’t understand why is it ‘サンキュー’ rather than ‘テンキュー‘
I watched a film recently where a door had ステイバク written on it. Like why write an English word in Japanese when an English speaker might not be able to read it and a Japanese speaker might not understand the English phrase. It got me thinking I wonder where else this occurs.
I understand the sense in physical object or places, like if you’d never seen an orange before and someone told you it was called an orange you’d associate that word with that object, but more abstract concepts and longer phrases I don’t quite get why you’d do it that way. Is there a reason it’s done this way?
My students don’t know that パソコン comes from personal computer, for example, and I don’t think コンセント from “concentric outlet” makes sense. Should have been “アウトレット” or something lol
From my experience, they generally just take words as is and understanding meaning from context, much like native English speakers learn to use “reconnaissance” without really understanding it’s origin or original intended meanings, a lot of French words are this way in the English language.
A perfect example is the question,「レッツゴーって英語でなんて言う？」… “Let’s go!” ? (real example)
If you’re in that industry, you learn those words. An accountant isn’t going to know medical terms, and that doctor isn’t going to know a lot of accounting terms.
Just like in English, there are some specialized words.
Nope. I remember I asked a japanese coworker about the meaning of a katakana work. He said he won’t know until he knows the context or better what it looks like.
> Dynamic Stability Control
I mean do all of us English speakers understand what Dynamic Stability Control is?
Are you from an English-speaking country? This phenomenon happens in many other countries to a greater or lesser extent. In Brazil, for example, we refer to out-of-home advertising as “outdoors”. Anything related to a healthy lifestyle or exercising will be called “fit”, such as “fit food” and “fit clothes”. We call our malls “shopping”, not to refer to the act of shopping, but to the place itself. I don’t really know why, but we call flash drives “pendrive”. And we call laptop computers “notebooks”. And no, lots of Brazilians have no clue what “notebook” or “outdoors” actually mean in English.
Some words have a similar meaning but are still used in a different way, like “home office”, which is a working model here, we literally say “My company is home office” or “I’m doing home office”. Other words become business jargon that most people won’t understand, such as “briefing” and “know-how”.
And, yes, we do have Portuguese words that could replace all of these (except for flash drives). Yes, the pronunciation of these words is adapted to the pronunciation of our own language. Yes, some of these definitely are Portuguese words now, but not all of them and there isn’t a sure way of defining when these words become Portuguese words. Yes, people do think English sounds cold and trendy. Yes, it’s an issue related to how linguistic imperialism makes people replace their own words with English versions because they were led to believe the languages of hegemonic countries are a symbol of status. It’s complicated.
Just remember that Japanese loanwords don’t have to maitain the meaning of the English words and don’t have to be understandable for English speakers.
I find it funny that I spend some hours everyday learning all type of verbs, nouns, kanji. Then I go to twitter and a lot of posts are just english written in katakana.
Alright, loan words are fun. To preface, I am not a native speaker so I can’t really talk specifically for Japanese, but I can give some more general overviews. Why a language chooses to use a loan word instead of a native word is either arbitrary or at best related to where an idea originated. We call them crepes (typically getting rid of accents because English doesn’t use them) but we could very well call them thin pancakes, or French tortillas, or plefs. And there is no reason a language can’t borrow words they already have another word for, for example, you noted that Latin based words are like 漢語 but when they were brought into English, they were probably (extremely) apparent in origin: shirt, blouse; room, chamber; shit, poop; cow, beef; etc. Quick history lesson, when the Francs invaded England, they brought their Frankish language with them and many of those words have since evolved to cover the areas the Francs were present in, especially government and fancy stuff (mansion is related to the French maison just meaning house). Of course, it is entirely possible for a language to more voluntarily loan words into their more casual speech in the same way.
Point is, the preexistence of a native word never necessarily precludes loaning. Whether or not speakers always actually understand these words is a different question that I am not qualified to answer.
They understand what it means to them.
I once saw a sign in the women’s clothing section of a department store;
“Feminism = Feminine + Specialist”
Ummmmmmmmm. No.
I’ve actually asked my students a similar question, and they answered, it’s kindof like – they know “this word” means “this thing”, as in “this series of sounds means that device I use to check my email”, but they have no clue what the original word was in a lot of cases. So for example, I can say to a student: “エイス”, and they know “the cold cubes that go in a drink”…but literally if I say “ice”, in an American accent, they rarely put two and two together and know it’s the same word. That might be a severe example but I can’t think of the ones my wife and I actually used in class when we last did this. My wife actually has a presentation where she has the students match the loan word to the original word, the kids dig it quite a bit.