Customer Reviews

Outrageous Japanese: Slang, Curses & Epithets

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this book to try and learn some more "colorful" Japanese. However, when I asked my Japanese wife (born in Japan and just immigrated to the US) if the book was correct, she said that a good number of the insults were from when she was a child in the 1960's.

ok, so let's face it, most japanese sensei are sweet and innocent. meaning: they won't teach you these types of words. great for the first few years of japanese learning, but after a while, the art of swearing is necessary! i am REALLY glad i had this book with me when i was a student studying in japan. really was useful to scare the drunks off of me on the osaka subway system. my advice: before going to japan study lots and lots of japanese. and have this book with you to complement your hard studies!

This is probably the most entertaining book you'll ever find on Japanese, and it's probably the funniest I've seen on any foreign language so far, and I've looked at a lot of language books.

The author has over 50 years of experience with Japanese and Japanese culture, including having written over 30 books, and he brings that wealth of experience and a very wry wit and ironic sense of humor to this book. And he's not shy about including some very funny and ribald stories from his younger army days about his first encounters with the seamy side of Japanese culture.

For example, "Ian-fu" means "a girl with no elastic in her drawers." This refers to the women who were sent to comfort the men during times of social unrest and war. As Seward says, most of the comforting took place in silence and in the horizontal position. And a "baka no baita" means an "ignorant slut."

Besides the above, Japanese has so many words for disparaging someone's intelligence that it would be impossible to list them all, but here is a selection from the book:

aho--dumb-ass

gutara--addlepated loafer

gubutsu--foolish chucklehead (this reminds me of when I was learning Mandarin Chinese, and I was told that a "tsao-tao" was a "stupid, happy person"

baka--horse-deer (whatever that is) :-)

Then there are a few strange curses:

Kuso sh_te shine--sh_t and die

Kuso sh_te nero--sh_t and go to sleep (one would think going to sleep constipated would be worse)

Mama-gon--forever scolding hell-hag of a mother

Snakes and turtles come in for a fair amount of abuse in Japanese for some reason, and the phrase, "Omae no yo na dongame wo yatou to wa yume ni mo orawenzo," translates as, "I would never dream of hiring a dull turtle like you." And "deb-game" translates as "a turtle with buckteeth," meaning "a peeping Tom."

So overall, a very funny and entertaining book on an aspect of Japanese language and culture that I haven't seen addressed by the many other books I've seen on Japanese.

Some books just have it! This short paperback, purchased out of desperation for my 11 yr old son, gave us both hours of much-needed laughter! Struggling with school-required Japanese, he felt hopeless & resented every minute of required study. Reading this book as a reward for completing a frustrating study session helped him look forward to getting the work done! The book is seriously organized by the most absurd topics, e.g., chapters re: insults and expressions involving body parts. The pronunciation guide is extremely clear- anyone could spout out the epithets without knowing a word of Japanese! The zaniness of some remarks left us hysterically laughing out loud! Enjoy! Now if they'd only write these for other languages...

Some books just have it! This short paperback, purchased out of desperation for my 11 yr old son, gave us both hours of much-needed laughter! Struggling with school-required Japanese, he felt hopeless & resented every minute of required study. Reading this book as a reward for completing a frustrating study session helped him look forward to getting the work done! The book is seriously organized by the most absurd topics, e.g., chapters re: insults and expressions involving body parts. The pronunciation guide is extremely clear- anyone could spout out the epithets without knowing a word of Japanese! The zaniness of some remarks left us hysterically laughing out loud! Enjoy! Now if they'd only write these for other languages...

This book is great. It is quite short though. The only problem i had was that half of the Slang was a diffrent way to say prostitute in japanese. I would recomend the power japanese slang book but this one is orginized very nice.

Well, if you really want to sound dirty in Japanese, you should study something else.
If you want to reharse your japanese, and to know how Japanese people think, that's the book for you.
The only defect is that is printed only in Romaji- anyway, when I feel blue, I think to myself like a third class sumo fighter , or say to myself I ought to commit suicide at the presence of a superior, and the world gets better.
A book to re-read, not only to read

I thought that this would be a funny book to just read on about but really I haven't used it once. And I find that some of it isn't really correct (if that makes any sense). Overall I'd just save your money and not bother with it.

Been playing around with the notion of learning Japanese. I figured if I was going to learn the "high" Japanese, may as well learn the colloquial. This is another of those books where I may not use it very often, but it will be good to know. If nothing else, it will make you chuckle.