☆NihonJack⇔日本ジャック☆コミュのJapanese vs. English: Foul Language?

This is an interesting topic to me, brought up in another post... I just wanted to see what everyone thinks.

I don't know if this is true, native speakers will have to comment on this, but I think that it is possible to "swear" in Japanese quite easily.

I heard the same thing as another member mentioned, that Japanese doesnt have any swear words. However, in Japanese it is less about the word and more about the way you say it. For example, if you look up "baka" in a dictionary, it says "fool" which is not a particularly strong word in English. However, there are many situations that I would translate "baka" as a swear word in English, depending on how the word is said and the context in which it is used. Of course, the same is true to some extent in English; the meaning of "fuck" when joking with friends versus when you are angry is different.

I think that unlike with English, in Japanese there are a lot more words that can be used in acceptable, benign ways as well as being elevated to something offensive, while there in English the lines tend to be drawn more clearly. There is no way to make "fuck" not a swear word.

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[1] mixiユーザー 10月18日 00:20

Yeah, that's basically what I was told. For instance, using the modes intended for addressing, say, animals, to address superiors is extremely offensive. Which of course makes swearing in Japanese difficult (not that swearing in English is easy....)

Of course, since then I've learned lots of pretty offensive Japanese words (I keep a list in my notebook ... I like being able to swear in other languages.) Here's a partial sampling:

ていめい (you bastard)
ばか (fool, stupid)
ばかやろう (asshole/bitch, for person not present)
やまんば (moutain hag)
かんぐろ (ditto, but for guys)
くそ (shit, damn)
ちくしょ (shit)
and, my personal favorite despite it's limited utility,
しばそぐ(Hiroshima-ben for 'I'll fucking kill you'.)

I've got a funny story with ていめい, actually. I was in a Matsuya in Shibuya with a friend, coming back from the clubs, and some random gaijin was in there abusing the staff, just viciously. They were just taking it, of course, so I motioned one of them over and tried to say 'that guy over there's a bastard' in my halting Japanese. My friend (who's fluent) told me after we left that what I actually said was "That guy over there is a you're a bastard."

Moral of the story, swearing in a second language is tricky.

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