The first time you saw a Japanese conversation on Twitter, YouTube, or other websites, you might have struggled to make heads or tails of it. Google Translate probably didn’t help either.
One reason why Japanese conversations online can be so difficult to follow is the prolific use of slang on the Internet. In this article, we’ll introduce 10 useful online slang expressions to help you in your quest to learn Japanese!
1. 笑, w, and other variants
Let’s start with a classic. The equivalent of “haha” in Japanese is （笑）, the kanji for laughter. This can also be written without parentheses as 笑. But just like how in English you can write “loool,” “LOL,” or “lmao,” there are also myriad ways to express laughter online in Japanese:
- w: Short for warau (笑う, “to laugh”), this is a very common way of abbreviating 笑.
- wwwww: Repeat w as many times as you want!
- 草 (kusa): Because a long line of w’s looks like grass, you can also use the kanji for grass 草 to represent laughter.
- 草生える (kusa haeru): Literally translated as “grass grows,” this is a variant of 草. You can use it as a verb, too.
- 大草原 (daisōgen): Yet another variant of 草. 大草原 literally means “prairie,” so you could use this when something is so funny that 草 isn’t enough to express your laughter.
- ワロタ (warota): This comes from the term 笑った (waratta, “laughed”), and it can be written in either katakana or hiragana. A further evolution of this term is ワロス (warosu).
- 爆笑 and other alternatives: Instead of writing 笑, you can opt for more specific words like 爆笑 (bakushō, “laughing hard”) and 苦笑 (kushō, “strained laugh”). These can be used with or without parentheses.
That’s a lot of ways to express laughter, and it’s not even a complete list!
While it may be tempting to go and try out all of these online, let me first offer you a word of caution. As you might know, on the English-speaking side of the Internet, some slang terms for laughter are strongly associated with specific subcultures. Examples include “omegalul” from Twitch culture and “I’m screaming,” which I associate with certain circles on Tumblr and Twitter.
This cultural specificity is characteristic of slang in general, so naturally all the Japanese terms I introduced above also come with their own associations. 草, for instance, is often seen on the imageboard 2chan and the video-sharing site Niconico, so it may have an “online nerd” feel to it. In my opinion, the safest terms here to use are （笑）and 笑. I also recommend “w” if you’re the kind of person who uses “lol” online.
2. 垢 (account)
The Japanese word for account is アカウント (akaunto), a direct loanword from English. This is often abbreviated as アカ (aka) or 垢, also pronounced aka. The kanji 垢, which typically means “grime,” was borrowed for its sound only. This practice of borrowing kanji for their sound is called 当て字(ateji), and there many examples of ateji in the Japanese language, such as 寿司 (sushi) and 倶楽部 (kurabu, “club”). In fact, we’ll be seeing a lot more ateji used in online slang in this article!
There are several words that spun off from 垢 to describe different kinds of online accounts:
