Onomatopeia

One of the most interesting and colorful aspects to Japanese is the increabile use of onomatopeia.
Onomatopoeia are words that reflect the sound things make. And for you, the student, learning onomatopiea will be lots of fun. Unfortunately onomatopeia is rarely taught in the classroom. However, it should be becuase it is very much an interal part of conversational and written Japanese.

If you want to learn Japanese start learning onomatopeia.  Onomatopeia is often thought as children book or comic language by non-Japanese teachers and some linguist. This could be one of the reasons why Japanese onomatopeia is not taught in the classroom.

Japanese has a rich onomatopoeic vocabulary, with several thousand words to describe the various
sounds things make as in the “the cat goes mewo”. Also there is mimesis, words to describe the state
of things. For example, “the tree stood looming”. It is important to realize that onomatopoeia can be used to make both grammatical and natural sounding sentences or language. This is not the case for English.

One of the first times you’ll probably hear the use onomatopoeia is in relation to rain or water. There are hundreds of onomatopoeia to desrcibe rain and , namely how it falls and how it lands. In Japanese, a statement such as “the water went drip drip down the sink” can mean various different things depending on the exact choice of onomatopoeia for “drip drip”. One could for instance use “taratara” which is the sound of a steady regular dripping, or “daradara”, which is a heavier sound. One could also use “botabota”,which is a fuller sound and implies big drops, or “tarari tarati” which would imply it’s only dripping intermittently. One could even use “pisha”, so that it’s the sound of only a single drophitting something.

As you can see Japanese onomatpoeia is a very complex use of sound words, something which in English is simply impossible because it lacks both the vocabulary for it, as well as the acceptance of using onomatopoeia in regular speech.