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You’ve Got Mail: Surprising Japanese Netspeak Verbs

Email Japanese uses a lot of special verbs in unique and interesting ways. Gaijinpot investigates some of the unusual ones typically found in Japanese internet terms.

By 2 min read 3

One of the more interesting things about the Japanese language is that it has a lot of verbs. Whereas English is often content to simply know who does what to whom, Japanese is a language that needs to know exactly what happened to the person and often whether it was done in a polite way or not.

One of the more interesting examples of this is email Japanese. I am one of those people who erase any remotely suspicious unread email, so when one day my girlfriend asked me what I was doing as I deleted mail after mail, I came up with いたずらメールだせばいい (these are spam, it’s better to delete them) as an explanation.

Almost as soon as the words came out of my mouth, her face turned up in that way that told me I’d said something wrong, but she was too polite to tell me. Finally, she couldn’t bear the temptation to one up me any longer and had to correct me. メールを削除さくじょ する was the correct form, she explained.

削除 する?!

This is one of the trickiest things about email Japanese. Instead of a lot of the verbs that we learners are used to, the language that Japanese people use for emailing often uses special verbs. Take for example the verb for attaching a file: most learners would guess that it might be つける or something like that, right? Nope! ファイルを添付てんぷする is the correct verb!

The language that Japanese people use for emailing often uses special verbs.

Even the basic verbs can be tricky. To talk about creating an email Japanese people use the verb 作成さくせいする. As if this wasn’t tricky enough already, this verb is often combined with the adjective meaning fresh or new, 新規しんき, to create the monster compound verb: 新規作成しんきさくせいする (to create a new email message).

Similarly, while even beginners are familiar with the verb おくるfor sending physical mail, for email the verbs are 送信そうしん する for sending and 受信じゅしんする for receiving email. In addition, because of the nature of email, you will also have to remember 転送てんそうする for forwarding an email message and 返信へんしんする for replying to one.

Finally, the other tricky verbs are the ones for saving data (保存ほぞんする) and compressing a file to save memory (圧縮あっしゅくする).

While it is easy to think that a lot of these words are too specialized to be useful, with email basically ubiquitous now, all learners will be hearing and using these verbs a lot. Luckily, any time spent learning these terms also has the added benefit of learning some incredibly useful kanji, all of which will come up for the JLPT N2 test.

So, while I may not be the trendy, young and internet-savvy person I envision myself to be, by spending the time learning these terms — at least I can sound like one!

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  • Sujeet/Reena Pradhan says:

    I hope this is not one of those April Fool-like blogs. Misleading contents. Most Japanese I have met in my university are quite flexible,

  • Anonymouse says:

    Are you exaggerating for comic effect? Because while メールを削除する is the most commonly used, using 消す isn’t wrong. Like either you live in a weird part of Japan where people can’t abide by anything but the most formal and correct-sounding speech, or your girlfriend’s a snob. And, for the record, neither is it wrong to say メールを作る or メールを送る (in fact myself, my friends, and my co-workers use 送る about half the time when talking about sending emails or messages to people).

    Like it’s great that you’re trying to teach people Japanese and stuff, but it’s not super cool to overstate the “wrongness” of words that aren’t wrong?! Japanese, like pretty much every other language out there, has multiple ways to say the same thing. Like, I call spam 迷惑メール, you call it いたずらメール, and some
    other people call itスパムメール. All are correct and it’s snobby (and linguistically flat out wrong) to try and pretend that there’s only one true correct way to say things. Next time please google something before you say it’s not correct (if you had you would have realized that メールを消す・作る・送る are all things a lot of Japanese people say).

    • A says:

      I agree with you, but in the anecdote it seemed he said ‘itazura mail’ and ‘kesu’ at the same time may sound a bit awkward. I think this is what’s so hard about Japanese ’cause there are lots of ways to say one thing, and one of them might seem more ‘correct’. I struggle with this but I learn not to nitpick too much otherwise the language can become overwhelming.

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