I am from Europe, an accumulation of many different countries with many different languages. I lived a good portion of my life in Bavaria, which is a small state in the south of Germany (Proud bavarians like to say it is the country between Germany and Austria, if you’d like to find it on a map). In this state people differ quite much from the rest of Germany, especially in terms of language. As in other dialects the majority of the words are different to standard German and even the grammar doesn’t match — in this sense it is almost a language on its own. If a Bavarian is talking strong dialect it is nearly impossible for other German speakers to be able the contents of his speech.

So during my life I attempted to learn several languages and for me it is always very interesting and fun to analyze and learn about the roots and origins of those languages. Especially in the group of western european languages it is astounding to find similarities (which actually make it easier to learn a new language from within the same group).

But not all is fun and games: There are pairs of words between languages that look or sound similar yet have no similarity in meaning whatsoever. I encountered lots of this words while learning English. Even between British English and American Englisch there are lots of false friends. But as for today I’d just like to list a couple of words in the Japanese language that originate from German, but have different meanings in Japanese:

But as I explained above: My first language is not German but Bavarian and therefore I’d like to introduce 2 words I encountered during living in Japan that sound perfectly Bavarian but have of course different meaning.

The first one is the store TSUTAYA which is most likely known by you all. Unfortunately the meaning of this word in Bavarian is “too expensive”. The second word is お祝い. Also this has no relationship with it’s Bavarian counterpart which sounds to 100% similar. The meaning here is “always”.

There you have it: A nice small set of words, that can even put together to form a small sentence which can be used in the following situation: In case you’re in Bavaria and go shopping in the same store a couple times and the items on sale are always too expensive simply align them and say: “お祝いツタヤ”. This has meaning and on top of it comes with free perfect Bavarian pronounciation for native Japanese speakers!

Even for two languages with huge differences and usually no relationship at all we were able to find a useful and nice similarity. I’m wishing you lots of fun for your next visit to Bavaria!