It's not slang afaik but めんどくさい (mendokk-sai) is this wonderful term in Japanese, at least in some use cases. It means bothersome or vexatious.
You know when your friends have an in-joke or there's something that's insider knowledge and an outsider asks you what it's about. There's really no payoff for explaining it and it's going to take ages to get there, if they even arrive at a point of understanding it?
And what do we have to communicate this in English, where the extreme effort that you'll both have to go is absolutely not worth it whatsoever? "Don't worry about it"? "It's nothing"?
In my experience most of the time that only piques people's interest and they'll press you harder to go into it.
Not in Japanese though. In Japanese you can just say "めんどくさい" and that's basically the end of that discussion.
This could be more of a reflection of Japanese culture about respecting people's privacy and saving face and stuff like that and less about the word itself but it's one of those little gems that I always miss when speaking English.
What is up with Japanese translation issues? I read Japanese Wikipedia a lot for train facts and auto-translate works pretty well there with the exception of strange sentences like "Rice field." which is a translation of "田." I'm guessing this is some kind of more formal speech. Mostly the translated text is understandable but confusing.
Twitter on the other hand is nearly incomprehensible. I follow Japanese train twitter and translate helps some but often tweets sound more like basic descriptions like "It is a picture of a train, but it was strange".
It's not slang afaik but めんどくさい (mendokk-sai) is this wonderful term in Japanese, at least in some use cases. It means bothersome or vexatious.
You know when your friends have an in-joke or there's something that's insider knowledge and an outsider asks you what it's about. There's really no payoff for explaining it and it's going to take ages to get there, if they even arrive at a point of understanding it?
And what do we have to communicate this in English, where the extreme effort that you'll both have to go is absolutely not worth it whatsoever? "Don't worry about it"? "It's nothing"?
In my experience most of the time that only piques people's interest and they'll press you harder to go into it.
Not in Japanese though. In Japanese you can just say "めんどくさい" and that's basically the end of that discussion.
This could be more of a reflection of Japanese culture about respecting people's privacy and saving face and stuff like that and less about the word itself but it's one of those little gems that I always miss when speaking English.
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What is up with Japanese translation issues? I read Japanese Wikipedia a lot for train facts and auto-translate works pretty well there with the exception of strange sentences like "Rice field." which is a translation of "田." I'm guessing this is some kind of more formal speech. Mostly the translated text is understandable but confusing.
Twitter on the other hand is nearly incomprehensible. I follow Japanese train twitter and translate helps some but often tweets sound more like basic descriptions like "It is a picture of a train, but it was strange".