Katakana false friends: 20 Japanese loanwords that don't mean what you think

Say マンション (manshon) out loud and an English speaker hears "mansion". A Japanese speaker means something quite different: a condominium, or more loosely an apartment building of concrete and steel, the kind of place where a young couple buys a flat near the station. A mansion in the English sense, a huge house with grounds, is a 豪邸(ごうてい) (a grand residence).

That one word is the whole problem in miniature. Katakana is easy to sound out, and what you get is a plausible English word. Often it is the right one. Often it isn't. This post collects 20 common katakana words where the Japanese meaning has moved, sorted by how they got there, so you can spot the pattern.

A quick vocabulary note. 和製英語(わせいえいご) ("Japanese-made English") is the usual name for words that look English but were built or reshaped in Japan. Strictly, some of the words below are shifted loanwords and some are true inventions. The two blur, and a learner needs to watch for both.

Group 1: the English word, with a different meaning

These borrow a real English word and then use it for something narrower, wider or just different.

マンション is usually described as a term that building developers adopted in the 1960s to make an apartment block sound grand. The shift stuck. For contrast, アパート is a smaller, usually lower-rise rental building, and 一戸建(いっこだ)て (a detached house) is a house of your own.

駅(えき)の近(ちか)くのマンションに住(す)んでいます。

I live in a condo near the station.

クレーム is what a customer makes to a shop or company, not a claim in the sense of "I claim this belongs to me". A clerk who says クレームが来ました is telling you that a complaint came in. The plain Japanese word for complaint is 苦情(くじょう), but クレーム is everywhere in customer-service talk.

テンション measures how wound up you are, in either direction. You can have high テンション or low テンション, and it is not a bad thing to be high.

明日(あした)は旅行(りょこう)だから、テンションが上(あ)がる。

I'm excited because the trip is tomorrow.

スマート keeps only the "neat and trim" side of smart. It describes a slim build or a sleek way of doing something. If you mean intelligent, say 頭(あたま)がいい or 賢(かしこ)い (clever). The phone is a separate word: スマートフォン, shortened to スマホ.

ナイーブ mostly means delicate and easily hurt, and it can be said kindly. The English sense, inexperienced about how the world works, is closer to 世間知(せけんし)らず. Japanese speakers do sometimes use ナイーブ in that sense too, but the "sensitive" meaning is the one to learn first.

サービス is "service", and also a free extra. When a waiter brings a dessert and says サービスです, it is on the house. In サービス残業(ざんぎょう), the "service" is the unpaid overtime that an employee gives away.

このデザートはサービスです。

This dessert is on the house.

リフォーム is what you do to a kitchen, a bathroom or a whole apartment. It also covers altering clothes. A change of government policy is a 改革(かいかく) (reform).

ストーブ is a heater you switch on in winter. A cooking stove is a コンロ.

Group 2: a borrowed word with a story of its own

These start from an English word, but the Japanese version took a turn that is not obvious.

コンセント is the wall outlet. It is usually explained as coming from "concentric plug", an old name for a type of plug fitting, and the word moved from the plug to the socket. The English "consent" is 同意(どうい). The plug itself is プラグ.

充電器(じゅうでんき)をコンセントに差(さ)してください。

Please plug the charger into the outlet.

カンニング is cheating on an exam. It comes from "cunning", but only the sneaky-in-a-test sense survived. You do カンニング on a test (カンニングをする), and the sly sense of cunning is ずる賢(がしこ)い.

バイキング is an all-you-can-eat buffet. The word is commonly traced to a Tokyo hotel restaurant in the 1950s that borrowed the Viking image for its Scandinavian-style spread. Many places now say ビュッフェ (a buffet, from French) instead, but バイキング is still common, especially for hotel breakfasts. The same word also means the actual Vikings.

ホテルの朝食(ちょうしょく)はバイキングだった。

The hotel breakfast was a buffet.

Group 3: made in Japan

Here the English parts are real, but the combination was put together in Japan. An English speaker may guess roughly right and still miss the point.

• サラリーマン (salaried worker). The standard word for a company employee, historically the white-collar man in a suit. The neutral word is 会社員(かいしゃいん) (company employee).
• ペーパードライバー (paper driver). Someone who holds a license but seldom or never drives, so the license exists only on paper.
• マイペース ("my pace"). Doing things at your own speed and in your own way. It can be neutral or a mild criticism, depending on how much the person ignores what others are doing.
• スキンシップ ("skin-ship"). Affectionate physical closeness, such as a parent holding a child. It is warm and not romantic by default.
• ガッツポーズ ("guts pose"). The fist pump of triumph.

優勝(ゆうしょう)が決(き)まった瞬間(しゅんかん)、彼(かれ)はガッツポーズをした。

The moment the win was settled, he pumped his fist.

彼(かれ)はいつもマイペースだ。

He always goes at his own pace.

Group 4: clipped short

Japanese often cuts long loanwords down to a few syllables, and four beats (mora) is a common landing point. Here the meaning is usually not wrong, only the form. The risk is that you will not recognize the original.

パソコン is the everyday word for a computer. The English "PC" is understood but less usual. エアコン covers both cooling and heating, which is why you will hear it in winter.

Why katakana is tricky for English speakers

Hiragana and kanji look foreign, so you slow down. Katakana looks like a code for a language you already know, so you speed up. You sound out ナ-イ-ー-ブ, hear "naive", and move on without checking.

Three things go wrong. The first is a false match, as with マンション. The second is a near match: the word is close to the English meaning, but narrower, as with ストーブ or リフォーム. The third is the opposite problem: you meet a word and fail to recognize it at all, because Japanese sounds and clipping reshape it. Nobody hears "personal computer" in パソコン the first time.

The fix is dull but dependable. Treat every katakana word as new vocabulary with a Japanese meaning to learn. Where you can, also learn the Japanese word for what you would have meant in English, such as 豪邸 for a mansion or 賢い for smart. That second step is the one that keeps you from saying the wrong thing in conversation.

Where this fits in Tangoya

Loanwords are a large part of what you will hear. Almost 2,000 of the 10,000 words most used in everyday Japanese conversation are loanwords, about one in five. They lean toward speech, too: a typical loanword sits about twice as far down a list of written Japanese as it does in conversation, so reading alone underrates them.

Most of them need no studying, though. Sound out テレビ, コーヒー or ホテル and you already have the meaning: about 1,450 of those 2,000 loanwords sound like an English word their dictionary definition gives. Tangoya, the vocabulary game this blog belongs to, sounds out every loanword, checks it against the English in its definition, and leaves the matches out. That leaves about 320 to learn: false friends like マンション, テンション and コンセント, clipped forms like パソコン and エアコン, and words taken from other languages, like パン (bread, from Portuguese) and アルバイト (part-time work, from German). Those are the app's 外来語(がいらいご) (loan words), one of its six kinds of word, with a level of its own; its label in the app is "katakana and false friends".

Each one is asked three ways. Read shows the word with four meanings, and the wrong ones can belong to katakana words that sound close, so コンセント may sit beside "contact lens", which is コンタクト. Listen plays the word, and you pick its meaning by ear. Recall gives you a Japanese sentence with a gap to type it into, the step that keeps you from reaching for the English. Every answer ends with the word's full definition and an example sentence, and a word you miss comes back later, asked the way you missed it.