Ken
I teach Japanese at McGill as a teaching assistant. As I am supposed to follow the concrete lesson plan from my supervisor, I do not usually teach slangs. However, many languages have slangs and thus, some language learners want to know them as well. In this post, I would like to share my experience when one of my students asked me one Japanese slang word: Yabai.
Yabai is an adjective denoting that something is bad or dangerous. Its original connotations were that the speaker felt he/she was in imminent danger or was about to be inconvenienced. The word is thought to derive from slang used by professional thieves and con artists and was already in use by the late Edo Period (1603-1868), when it was pronounced yaba. Some say it derives from the word ayabui, meaning dangerous.
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