相席（あいせき,） means “sharing a table with someone you don’t know (e.g. at a restaurant)” (Takoboto).
What other fun words have you all encountered that just don’t translate well to English or require a short explanation?
I’d like to make a sentence that’s very long in translation, and/or read a silly sentence like that.
Maybe ご多忙中 (ごたぼうちゅう) is a good example? Something like “Excuse me for interrupting you when you are so busy”.
Edit: 盥回し (たらいまわし) - handing off a problem to someone else to evade responsibility
I wandered in here from All (I’m a Los Angeles person who doesn’t speak Japanese) and I’m going to try to experience doing this just so I can use the word Takoboto. Is Takoboto a common thing in Japan? I think it’s a little unusual here, except at a long counter. English started as “three languages in a trenchcoat” and has survived by stealing ever since, so I wouldn’t be surprised if 20 years from now Takoboto was just accepted as another English word, the way we stole umami. (Yes we had “savory” but that already had too many connotations and connections that didn’t necessarily fit with the precise flavor of umami.)
To clarify, the word OP brought up is “aiseki”.
(Takoboto is a dictionary site.)
Oh! Thank you for stopping me making a complete fool of myself!
(In the outer world, behind my own face, that is. I’ve already done it here!)
上下左右 (じょうげさゆう). Means “top, bottom, left, and right”. It isn’t used very often, but it’s useful for talking about web design, which is how I first encountered it.
拘り (こだわり) when used for food. It’s easier to translate it as a verb (拘る), which means to be particular about something. 玉子に拘っている can very simply be translated as “We’re particular about eggs”, but 拘りの玉子サンド is much more difficult to translate. In this usage, it means that lots of care, thought, time, and/or work has been put into getting it right. There are a few translations you could use, but I don’t think any one of them had quite the same nuance. Jim Breen dictionaries translate them as “speciality”, but I don’t think it captures the original meaning at all. You could translate it as “artisanal” or “finest”, but that gives it more of a high-end or luxury sounding nuance. “Meticulously crafted” is also close, but that sounds like something very complex or elaborate, whereas the original can be used for simple things.
Tagalog, my native language, has one that I’ve always wondered about: ‘umay.’ I would translate it as “too delicious, it’s almost sickening.”
Imagine a cake that’s too delicious, overwhelms your senses with sweetness, tartness, bitterness and all the good things that in moderation, would have made for a perfectly delicious cake. For example, “Masarap naman yung cake ni Maria, kaso nakaka-umay” (“Maria’s cake is delicious, really, but it’s a bit too much for me”). I guess one can put it as ‘too much,’ or ‘overwhelming,’ but there’s this additional element of “it’s actually kinda good, you know, but it went a bit too far.”
Now, I’ve been wondering if it’s related to the Japanese 美味い (うまい), and the wiktionary entry I linked earlier has it as a possible origin. I find it kinda (morbidly) funny wondering if it got its present meaning during the second world war, when the Japanese invaded the Philippines. I’d imagine Filipinos would just keep saying “it’s delicious, it’s delicious,” just to placate the Japanese, even if they’re already too sick and tired of it.
