This has been annoying me for a while now. If you talk about Japanese game/anime/manga/whatever it's not unusual to see some Japanese words pop up here. I'm not talking about things that are so common everyone should know what it means, like say a shoryuken when you're talking about Street Fighter or even fighting games in general. I don't have a problem if the term would translate very poorly into another language (Naruto's eye powers come to mind). I can even accept some people might think it's cool that they know in the Japanese version of One Piece they double up the noun to describe a fruit power, even though I think everone knows that by now.
But what I don't get is why people use Japanese when it's clear that you're not talking with anyone who is a native speaker (including the guy using it), and probably needed to look up Wikipedia or Google Translate to see what it means. In Street Fighter people tend to say it's a fireball-trap, not a hadoken trap even though presumably everyone ought to know what you're talking about, and the fireball isn't even a remotely accurate translation for hadoken. Still, it fits the language you take about and nobody can possibly get confused. Does everyone seriously know the hundreds of nijitsus with way too long names in Naruto? All the Final Fantasy 'summons' are 'Summoned monsters' in Japanese, but thankfully nobody refers to them that way (I think), because it would sound pretty stupid. Again there are things that don't translate well but there are also quite a lot of Japanese that translates very well.
Is it really that hard to tell that Wind Spiral Shuriken is Naruto's latest move that involves him throwing an object that's spinning like a shuriken, not to mention the move means exactly just that. Sure in that example you can say it's like a trademark move so everyone should know what it's Japanese is just like everyone knows what a shoryuken is, but there are obviosly far more obscure nijitsus in the world of Naruto that nobody ought to know like the back of their hand.
Then again I remember having to argue with people that Megaman X's name was really Ikusu and Sigma was really Shiguma, even though Megaman X is titled with the English 'X' even in Japanese, and Sigma always had the Greek symbol Sigma as his name, so maybe there is no hope for humanity after all.
But what I don't get is why people use Japanese when it's clear that you're not talking with anyone who is a native speaker (including the guy using it), and probably needed to look up Wikipedia or Google Translate to see what it means. In Street Fighter people tend to say it's a fireball-trap, not a hadoken trap even though presumably everyone ought to know what you're talking about, and the fireball isn't even a remotely accurate translation for hadoken. Still, it fits the language you take about and nobody can possibly get confused. Does everyone seriously know the hundreds of nijitsus with way too long names in Naruto? All the Final Fantasy 'summons' are 'Summoned monsters' in Japanese, but thankfully nobody refers to them that way (I think), because it would sound pretty stupid. Again there are things that don't translate well but there are also quite a lot of Japanese that translates very well.
Is it really that hard to tell that Wind Spiral Shuriken is Naruto's latest move that involves him throwing an object that's spinning like a shuriken, not to mention the move means exactly just that. Sure in that example you can say it's like a trademark move so everyone should know what it's Japanese is just like everyone knows what a shoryuken is, but there are obviosly far more obscure nijitsus in the world of Naruto that nobody ought to know like the back of their hand.
Then again I remember having to argue with people that Megaman X's name was really Ikusu and Sigma was really Shiguma, even though Megaman X is titled with the English 'X' even in Japanese, and Sigma always had the Greek symbol Sigma as his name, so maybe there is no hope for humanity after all.
