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The cool thing about comparing languages which are as distantly related as English and Japanese, is when you dig deep enough, you’ll uncover little linguistic quirks which blow your mind. Here are a few examples.

1. Raccoons are Bears

Japanese people consider raccoons to be small bears, in the same way English speakers consider lions to be big cats. They call them “araiguma”, which means “bear who washes”, a reference to how raccoons are always washing things in rivers.

2. Small Lizards are Bugs

Japanese people consider small lizards to be bugs. To complicate things further, this doesn’t go for large lizards. And here I was thinking the reptile/amphibian families were hard to keep track of!

3. Ninjas and Geisha

The “ja” in “ninja” and the “sha” in “geisha” are actually the same root word, meaning “person”. The reason they seem different is because of rendaku, or “muddied speech”, a phenomenon where “voice” is added to voiceless consonants in certain situations. The thing about rendaku is it’s completely unpredictable, much to the chagrin of JSL students, and that’s why it hits ninja but not geisha.

4. Hoping and Wishing

ESL students from Japan have a lot of difficulty learning when to say “hope” and when to say “wish”. This is because in Japanese, they don’t really distinguish between the two concepts. Actually, the same remark goes for Spanish and probably all the romance languages. Hoping vs. wishing seems to be an uncommon distinction. Kind of changes the way you look at a lot of U.S. political slogans.

5. Affectionate Nicknames

Japanese is barren of affectionate nicknames like “sweetheart”, “dear”, “honey”, or “darling”. They actually know what “darling” means, because it was frequently used in the cartoon Urusei Yatsura (about as well-known over there as The Simpsons is in the U.S.). Even knowing the meaning, nobody outside the cartoon actually uses the word.

6. Alcoholic Veal

Because of how limited Japanese phonology is, they filter a lot of information out when they adopt English words. This sometimes creates unexpected homonyms: for example, “Beer” and “Veal” become perfect homonyms. Cheers

7. Negative Transfer

As between any two languages, sometimes words are borrowed, but not quite perfectly. Two examples are “ham” and “mansion”. The Land of the Rising Sun borrowed ham as “hamu”, but it actually means “lunchmeat”; they borrowed mansion as “manshon”, but it actually means “apartment”. Negative transfer goes both ways. We borrowed “kamikaze” and understand it as a suicide airplane attack, but in Japanese it literally means “divine wind” and refers to the hurricanes which thwarted the Mongol invasions.

8. No Hot Water

To Japanese people, there’s no such thing as water which is hot. Hot water and non-hot water are distinct substances with distinct names, yu and mizu, respectively. Nobody ever speaks of hot mizu or cold yu. Similarly, Japanese distinguish between the adjectives “cold” as in “it’s cold outside” (samui) and “cold” as in “cold to the touch” (tsumetai).

9. Different Types of Rice

I’d say that Japanese are the Eskimos of rice, except that the old “100 words for snow” thing is a total urban myth. Anyway, to a Japanese person, rice growing in a field, rice sitting in a bag, and rice cooked in a bowl, are three completely distinct things (albeit closely related in a natural way, but still distinct).

10. Legs and Feet

The same word, “ashi”, means both “foot” and “leg” in Japanese. I’m sure medical doctors have specialized words corresponding to what English speakers think of as the leg and the foot, but in everyday speech, they’re identified as one single inseparable thing.

11. Green Light

This is really more of a quirk of English, but you’re much more likely to independently discover it if you study some Japanese. In English, we say a stoplight is “green” if it’s any of a number of colors, including green, white, or blue.

FURTHER READING

Japanese False Cognates
Japanese Words You Already Know
Japanese Animal Onomatopoeia
Goldmine of Engrish