This is the second video of the Waku Waku Japanese video series teaching simple Japanese words and phrases. This video teaches three onomatopoeia expressions for feelings turned into verbs by the addition of SURU which is the general verb used for doing things. This video teaches the meaning of waku waku which means to feel happy or excited, doki doki which is to be nervous yet excited, and ira ira which is an expression of anger. I’m not excatly sure how imprtant these three onomatopoeia verbs really are, and I’m also kind of confused why they would jump from teaching basic introductory phrases into teaching three (possibly seldomly used) onomatopoeia verbs, but whatever, we will continue onto the next video. If you would like to know more than these three words, I created a couple courses on memrise a while ago. The first one only has a little over 100 Japanese onomatopoeia words, and not all of them are necessarily useful, but it does include animal noises and such. The second one has over 1000 onomatopoeia words in Japanese, but I still don’t know exactly how practical most of this really is. Japanese children’s books usually contain a lot of onomatopoeia. The book, Penguin’s pillow especially had a lot of onomatopoeia words.
The Secrets of Japan - 101
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