Do you know how to calculate fish in Japanese? Or what do you call the thing you drink from it? Or call rice on the rice in a bowl?
The answer is not as simple as you think.
I lived in Japan for 7 years and studied Japanese even longer. I was surprised at how Japanese differentiated the world from English. In English, Japanese people have two words when there is only one word. The result is that the Japanese point out interesting differences in the world that you might miss out on English.
Here are some examples of some differences that Japanese makes English do not have.
どイス (raisu ) and ごご (Gohan)
In the United States, if you point to a bowl of rice and ask me what it is, I say "rice". If you point to a bag of rice on a store shelf, I would also say “rice.” But not in Japanese.
In Japanese, rice is a very important part of life, so they have more than one word for small grains for us to eat.
There are 3 main methods for Japanese to refer to rice:
1. Ingredients ( ine ) - Rice grows in the husk or still in the wild
2. Rice ( kome ) - Threshold uncooked rice is usually white [ root rice ( genmai ) is usually used to distinguish brown rice]
3.ごご( Gohan ) - Cooked white rice
The Japanese do not confuse them or use them interchangeably. Many times , I've said about what we need to buy in the store that my Japanese wife is angry and I'll spend a lot of money on things we can make money at home.
However, the biggest thing that I was confused about when I first arrived in Japan was why some menus say Raisu and others are ご究( Gohan ).
Like Raisu , Gohan is cooked white rice, not just any cooked white rice. It is commonly used to refer to Japanese rice, a sterile layer of short-grain rice and in...