What Are the Most Common Onomatopoeia in Japanese?
The Japanese language has many quirks that make it alluring for students. After studying it for almost 8 years, one of the things that fascinates me is its rich pool of onomatopoeic expressions.
English is not lacking in this respect: we have words like bang, clang, clatter and sputter which sound like the verbs they describe. Riffraff, whippersnapper and so on also have the property of alliteration. But Japanese, in my opinion, takes this to a whole new level.
Note: This post is aimed at people who are learning Japanese, but not advanced, or people who are interested in knowing more about Japanese culture and language. Due to this, I will use romaji -western characters for Japanese words- a lot, even though it is aesthetically quite unsatisfying to look at.
In the Japanese language there are basically two kinds of onomatopoeia.
- 擬音語 (giongo) are words that mimic sounds. These could be the sound of barking (wan-wan), whistling (hyou-hyou), and so on.
- 擬態語 (gitaigo), or mimetic words, are words that are supposed to mimic actions, states or emotions. They describe sensorial experiences outside of sound, like how a thing feels to the touch (e.g., bisshori: soaking wet, or gotsugotsu, coarse, gnarly).
Onomatopoeia in Japanese often come in the form of two syllables repeating twice (gata-gata, nuku-nuku), or two syllables joined by a pause and the syllable ‘ri’ (e.g., gussuri, where the double consonant is read gus-pause-su-ri).
I like the first kind especially, as it lends the language a playful tone. Gitaigo can serve to emphasize emotions or sensations that are sometimes harder to put into words (especially one single word) in other languages like my native Spanish.
For this article, instead of picking my own favorite onomatopoeic or mimetic words, I chose to do a little analysis. Borrowing from an online web corpus, I looked into what the most common onomatopoeia in Japanese are. I filtered to limit the analysis to those words that follow the pattern I explained above.
Here are the most commonly used mimetic words in Japanese:
If you are learning Japanese, just by memorizing these 12 words you will have made a decent progress into learning mimetic words. These also appear often if you’re watching anime. Especially sorosoro (which can mean ‘for the moment…’), and girigiri (which means ‘By a slim margin’, like ‘I was late for only 30 seconds!’ or ‘That almost got me!’),
In more violent shows, barabara also features prominently, as making someone go barabara can mean dismembering them. And dokidoki appears in 8 out of 10 anime openings.
Wakuwaku may need no introduction, since it is SpyxFamily’s Anya’s signature catchphrase. Mechakucha means messy, both messy hair or a messy room.
As for the adverbs ending in ri, here are the 9 most common (I stopped at 9 as they are significantly less common than the other category).
Interestingly, I had never seen sarari or garari before. The others are all pretty common, with niyari used a lot for bully characters, pittari for clothes (e.g., pittari au : it fits you nicely).
If you are just here to see fun words, that’s it for today. I hope this entertained you! And maybe if you’re into anime, you’ll start hearing these sometimes from now on.
If you are a student and think any of these words are going to be useful to you, I recommend you add them to your anki deck or any other SRS system you use. I actually thought of making an anki deck with the 21 words to accompany this post, but I feel the effort may be wasted depending on how many people are interested, so let me know if this would be a thing you would want to use (it would be free, obviously).
Also feel free to use either image any way you want, as a consultation chart or just adding it to your blog. Just don’t erase the watermark, and consider linking to this post so I know it was useful to someone!
Corpus Source: Ninjal LWP for BCCWJ
Further Reading
For a more thorough list of onomatopoeia and mimetic words in Japanese, refer to Tofugu’s Japanese Onomatopoeia Guide. I think the list here is so big it becomes sort of overwhelming, and I wish it were presented in a more pallatable way (maybe an Anki deck?). But I think this is a great resource to study at your leisure, perhaps in chunks.
This is a slight departure from my usual programming related posts, so if you liked it please share it on Twitter or with your friends, so I know if I should keep making these too!