I’ve now been living in Tokyo for a little over 2 years! To celebrate this milestone (okay, fine, the milestone is just a coincidence; this blog post has nothing to do with it), I thought I’d share something I find delightful in the Japanese language, and that is its onomatopoeia.
Just like English, Japanese has words which are formed “from a sound associated with what is named.” They are very often repeated. Here are some examples of their words for sounds:
However, Japanese also makes ample use of onomatopoetic words for things where the connection to a sound is less obvious, such as: