Learn Japanese Today

It was my birthday yesterday, so I went out to dinner with my brother at this very delicious, very expensive sushi place in Chicago called Mirai. We had some strange and delicious dishes including thinly sliced strips of ika (squid) in an uni (sea urchin) sauce and some wasabi tobiko (flying fish roe mixed with wasabi) topped with a quail egg. Pretty interesting stuff. The highlight of the meal was definitely the platter with three different levels of fatty tuna, each unbelievably delicious in its own way. The meal ended up costing $200 for the two of us, but thankfully my parents had agreed to reimburse me as their big birthday present for me. Definitely a good one.

Anyways, the reason I brought this up was a certain dish we ate called “Spicy Mono.” I don’t remember exactly what was in it, but I’m still laughing at the name today. Can you imaging going into a restaurant and saying, “Yes, I’d like the ’spicy thing’ thank you.” This got me thinking about how the word “thing” is used in English and Japanese.

In Japanese mono can refer to just about any noun you can think of except for maybe places, whereas ‘thing’ in English generally refers to concrete, inanimate nouns. I guess you can use it sometimes for abstract nouns, but in most situations it sounds awkward like, “bravery is a thing that lets you overcome fear.” You would usually just say “bravery lets you overcome fear.”

Also, in Japanese, the word koto means the same thing as “thing,” but for verbs. I really like the word koto because it just doesn’t have any real counterpart in English. Instead we’re forced to use words like “action” and “process” when koto would be much simpler. For example, if you were explaining what a pass is in football, you could say “The action of throwing the ball” but in addition to sounding silly, it also sounds like it just refers to the quarterback’s muscular movements, excluding the ball moving through the air. If you followed that up with “the pass was intercepted” people would be very confused.

Instead, what is typically said in English is something like “it’s when someone throws the ball.” But what is “when” referring to? If the game is on Sunday, does that mean the “pass” is Sunday? There aren’t any other time-sensitive words in the sentence. What’s implied in the sentence is “it’s what happens when someone throws the ball.” But even that has the problem of ignoring the throwing process. English has developed in such a way that we know what people mean when they say “it’s when someone throws the ball,” but that’s because we’ve been without a word like koto for so long that we break grammar rules to create the same effect. In Japanese you just say “bo-ru- o nageru koto” or “the thrown ball thing” and everyone will know what you’re talking about.

Japanese - 1
English - 0

Actually, the score is probably much higher. Who do you think is winning?