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Writer's picturePele Le'au

Untranslatable Words




しょうがない: sho • ga • nai

"Shoganai means ‘it can’t be helped’, but also expresses a conviction that there’s no point in complaining if a situation is out of one’s control. This mentality can be both realistic and fatalistic, and perhaps helps explain why Japanese people deal with earthquakes and tsunami without much complaining, and also why so many rail about the ruling government party but don’t bother to vote," (Oxfordworks).







つんどく: tsun • do • ku

"This word is made up of the characters for the verb ‘to accumulate, pile up’ and the verb ‘to read’, but it is also a play on tsunde oku, which means to simply pile up something and leave it. It is defined as constantly buying books that accumulate but never get read, but all of us who have piles of unread books at home can take comfort in the presence of the character ‘to read’ in tsundoku, which suggests to me that we will get around to reading our piles of books one of these days," (Oxfordworks).


Tsundoku to me:

Will I touch those books again?

The pile grows more..




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