Hacker News Reader

Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

I am very new at japanese, so don't take my word for this, but there aren't a lot of "motherfucker" style insults in japanese. You mostly insult people by talking to them with the wrong politeness level. The meaning of the word is still something like "you".

http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/insults.html

View on HN

Yep thats kind of my point, the idea that a word by itself, regardless of intent could be offensive, made absolutely no sense to them.

To put it into perspective, I've seen nearly every word on your list in different childrens cartoons/anime.

You are mostly correct, it is one of the more interesting things about Japanese that the context outweighs the use of the word in many situations.

That being said, there are a number of words that are NEVER appropriate out of starting a fight. Probably not as many as English, but I can think of about 20 or so off the top of my head.

Japanese insults are never as simple as the ones in US English. Its usually expressions rather than words alone.

But the best languages for swearing are probably the latin languages such as French Spanish and Italian. They have all very colorful expressions and a high variety of ways to express them. English and American English are extremely limited in comparison.

There is a great passage from Feynman's autobiography, where he visited Japan for an academic conference and learned some Japanese from an American WWII occupation phrasebook. This was not well-received, and he couldn't figure out why until he started to learn Japanese from someone who actually spoke the language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com