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.
According to its etymology, Yabai began to take on a broader meaning in the 1980s as young people started using it to mean “uncool.” As in the past, it still carried a negative connotation. That changed in the 1990s, however, when young people started using it in a positive sense to mean “very good” or “delicious,” in much the same way that the English words bad and wicked have at times taken on positive connotations among younger generations. The colloquial pronunciation of the word, yabeh, is also popular.
For example, in the following sentence,
The restaurant we went to was Yabai!
the meaning varies depending on the tone of the speaker or even his/her facial expression.
You cannot understand whether this restaurant is good or bad from the text.
An opinion poll conducted by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in July 2005 found that 18.2% of people use yabai to mean “great.” The practice was particularly common among young people: More than 70% of boys aged 16-19 had used the word in a positive sense, while the ratio for girls in the same age range was over 60%.
I have already shared this episode with my roommates and one of them was against teaching slangs, saying, “I want everyone to use the beautiful languages. If you don’t know the slangs, you never use them!” However, another said, “Slangs are everywhere in almost all languages. If you are unfamiliar with them, you can’t catch up with the conversation anyway!”
“Well, what do you think?”
What is the meaning of “Yabai” frequently used by Japanese people?
Ken, super interesting! In my work as a Speech-Language Pathologist I have come across a similar debate around profanity. Some people in my profession, when working with students who use means other than speech for communication (often falling in the category of AAC – Alternative and Augmentative Communication, such as iPads and Communication Binders) build repertoires for them which do not include some words, including swear words. I, personally, believe that you can and should teach slang and profanity and include its full meaning and pragmatic weight. It is part of the communicative environment and whether or not you support the expressive use of these terms, all students should be equipped to make full sense of such terms receptively and to be able to make informed choices about their expressive language use. -Amelia
also: forgive my terrible memory but is there a similarly slang-y word that literally translates to “money” and means something is good? -Amelia
I teach Japanese as a teaching assistant, too, and the textbook we use (Nakama) includes some slangs such as マジで！？(pronounced: ma-jee-deh, meaning really!?) The book introduces the word like this: マジで！？(very casual). When I taught this word to my students, I emphasized that they could only use this word to their close friends. I personally think it is important to teach slangs because that’s what they hear all the time in real life. At least three of my students are going to Japan next year for an exchange program, and they WILL hear slangs like “yabai” or “majide!?” all the time from their new friends. I don’t want them to think that these are the words they can use anytime and to anyone, so I think it’s important to teach them in what situations they can use these slangs. -Yuri
I agree with the second opinion, however the first one does not seem unacceptable. We are living in an era that everyday the standard language becomes close to the colloquial one. As a teacher, I witness the rapid increase in using the slangs among adolescents every year. In this sense, slangs are everywhere and we cannot avoid them while we are sure that our interlocutors regularly use them. Thus, we need to learn them although that we may not be interested to use them.
Hi Ken, thanks for sharing your experience. I’ve had similar situations where my students begged for more slangs, haha. Personally, I think as language teachers, we should teach slangs, for the simple reason that slangs are so frequently used in daily communication and communication is the goal for language teaching. In other words, if our students don’t understand a frequently-used slang, we cannot say that our language teaching is successful enough. However, I also think that the teaching of slangs depends on factors like the the frequency of occurrence of the slang in daily communication, and the language proficiency of learners, etc. Teachers should make decisions according to different situations. –Yiling
This is a really interesting topic that I have also been thinking recently. I have never learned about slangs in English classes in China, and that is also why I felt a little bit confused when I came to Canada and talked to English as first language speakers, as I mentioned in my first blog. I think it would be better if some slangs were taught in the classroom, because learning a language is more of learning how to communicate. Sometimes, when a slang is used widely, it may become a formal and interesting expression. In Mandarin, the term “给力“ was originally a slang, then it was put into the dictionary and used by president Xi in his lecture after the term was widely used and recognized.
Mengting L