Blog #9: Summary of UNIT1 and Japanese slangs

Hi my name is Kotaro Yajima.

In this section, I learned about slang. Slang is a change from correct language, of course, and language is always changing. Slang is used not to be understood by out-side groups, it’s like a secret language. Also using slang gives let you share your experience emotionally. Some people don’t like using slangs, but slang will become a subject of serious academic study.

Now I will intriduce 3 Japanese slangs I use mostly are Pakuru(パクる)、Maji(マジ), and Yabai(ヤバい).

We usually use Pakuru in 2 meanings. One is to steal. Stealing is Nusumu in Japanese, but most of young Japanese, especially men, use Pakuru, such as “自転車(bicycle)をパクられた” means “my bicycle was stolen”.  The other meaning is to imitate. When your friend make imitation of your homework, you say “パクるな” means do not trace my homework. I think it comes from stealing one’s idea.  Sometimes people use this slang as a meaning of arresting, but mostly this is used as stealing or imitating. These 3 meanings began to be used by young bad guys from the Meiji era. The last one, to arrest , has 2 roots. One is from 縛(Baku, tie something) or a German word “packen”, means catch.

2^nd example, Maji, means “really”. You use when you are surprised like “Oh Maji!?” or when you define something like “This car is Maji cool!!”.  The root of Maji is old, this word is already used in Edo era, almost 300 years ago. Maji comes from Majime真面目, serious. So it used to be used when a speaker talks seriously. Such as “I don’t have much money seriously.” Then it changed to “I really don7t have money.”

Last example is Yabai. This has both negative and positive meanings. There is no term to define exactly what this word mean, but I think positive meaning is like “cool”, and negative one is “bad”. With the second example, Yabai, we can say “This is maji yabai.”

    This could mean “This is really cool” or “this is really bad”. This word used to mean “un convenient” used by robbers in Edo era. From 1990s this word has been has both negative and positive meanings.

Those 3 slangs are usually used among students. The reason why they are used instead of correct Japanese is they have more than 1 meaning, and so flexible. We can apply them in any situation in our conversation. Also they are short, this means easy to say, and as we see in the DVD, using slang makes our conversation funnier and we can be more friendly.

     I use none of them when I talk to teachers or people who are older than me though.