What are Onomatopoeia?

Onomatopoeia are words formed to imitate or suggest the sounds they are describing. For example, the word “meow” or “roar” are onomatopoeias, as the words themselves imitate the sounds. In fact, many words for animal noises are onomatopoeias. Also, words like pop, whoosh, and bang are all onomatopoeia. These words help to spice up a sentence and give more flavor to the way we read, write, and speak.

Why Learn Onomatopoeia in Japanese?

So why is it so important to learn onomatopoeia in Japanese? If you were learning English for the first time, onomatopoeias wouldn’t be very high up the priority list of things to learn first. However, Japanese uses a lot of onomatopoeia in every day speech and writing. If you live in Japan, it can feel like you learn a new onomatopoeia every day. Knowing at least the most common ones can really improve your listening and reading comprehension.

There are thousands of onomatopoeia in Japanese. So if you want to be able to fully understand people, then you’ll need to start learning as soon as possible. While they won’t be the first things you learn in a beginner’s course, they are important enough to be taught by the time you reach intermediate lessons. Once you’ve learned the basics of Japanese, adding in onomatopoeias can help make your otherwise textbook sounding, speech sound more natural. Even if all you want to do is read manga in Japanese, onomatopoeia are still super important. In manga, they are all over the pages, describing sounds, feelings, movements, and more!

Onomatopoeia Forms

Broadly speaking, onomatopoeias come in three different forms listed below:

Not all onomatopoeias can take on all of the forms. Also, their usage can change depending on what you are trying to say. For example, “nikoniko” can be used as an adjective or an adverb. It can also be made into a verb by adding shiteiru (している) as seen in this sentence:

“彼はいつもにこにこしている” meaning “He is always smiling.”

Depending on which onomatopoeia you use with a verb, you can be more specific. Looking at 笑う, which can mean to smile or to laugh, we can add different onomatopoeia to change what kind of laugh or smile it is specifically.

For example, “にこり笑う” means “to smile sweetly”. However, “げらげら笑う” means “to laugh loud and hearty”.

5 Different Types

Now that we’ve shown the different forms our onomatopoeia can take, let’s look at how they are separated into different types. The way they are grouped breaks them down by what each onomatopoeia is trying to reference or describe. Sometimes people break them down into the first three groups below, but they can be more narrowly placed into five groups. To be more specific, we will show all five of the categories they can be grouped into:

1. Giseigo (擬声語) – Sounds made by either humans or animals
2. Giongo (擬音語) – Real life sounds made in nature or by inanimate objects
3. Gitaigo (擬態語) – Expression of conditions and states which have no sounds.
4. Giyougo (擬容語) – Expression of movements and motions.
5. Gijougo (擬情語) – Expression of people’s feelings.

Side note: Onomatopoeias can be written in either hiragana or katakana.

Examples of Each Type

Gisego (Human or animal sounds):

Giongo (Real life sounds by nature or inanimate objects):

Gitaigo (Conditions and states with no sounds):

Giyougo (Movements with motions):

Gijougo (People’s feelings):