Chira Chira ちらちら is phenomimic and refers to something as fluttering, intermittent, or flickering. Imagine cherry blossom season, and you’re sitting under warm うらうら (read: clear, breezy) weather drinking Suntory beer with your best friends. Cherry blossom leaves are falling in a ちらちら way. Rain and snow can also be described as falling in a [...]

Botsu Botsu If you have had a zit-outbreak, chicken pox, or any sort of bumpy outbreak, your skin wasぼつぼつ. The phenomimic term is used to describe anything that is bumpy in texture. For example, outbreaks on skin of humans or animals, and bumpy textures on inanimate objects like car and bicycle tires, can all be [...]

Fuwa Fuwa “ふわふわだね！” is a phrase that you’ll hear most often from Japanese women when, say, describing their friend’s new mobile phone strap or new stuffed animal toy. ふわふわ literally means soft or soft in touch or feel. Quite often it can be used to describe food and will often find a place in the [...]

Pika Pika The first thing that one might think about when they first read ぴかぴか is the infamous, omnipresent, and everyone’s childhood favorite – Pikachu. Pikachu enjoys his name from the term ぴかぴか, according to an interview with the creator Satoshi Tajiri. ぴかぴか can be either phenomimic or phonomimic, though both have to do with [...]

かんかん can carry three different meanings: 1) clanging noise of a bell tower, 2) a sizzling hot day, and 3)angry, furious as in he was furious. They all carry a similar meaning of high intensity in terms of either sound or heat, and the usage can be pretty clear to understand just from the context [...]

It’s springtime and the sun shines gently warm. This phenomimic onomatopoeia is known asうらうら [uraura] in Japanese. People would use this term to describe how their day is or how their day went. Much like how in English one might say, “Ah, what a beautiful day!” on the turn of spring the Japanese language also [...]