What are some common false friends in Japanese and English

Common false friends between Japanese and English are words that look or sound similar but have different meanings in the two languages. Some well-known examples include:

• マンション (mansion) in Japanese means a condominium or apartment building, not a large luxurious house as in English.
• コンセント (consento) in Japanese means electrical outlet or plug, different from the English “consent.”
• サービス (saabisu) in Japanese often means a free service or extra, unlike the English word which broadly means any kind of service.
• シャツ (shatsu) means a general shirt in Japanese, while in English “shirt” commonly refers to a specific style of clothing.
• バイキング (baikingu) in Japanese means a buffet-style meal, coming from “Viking” but unrelated in English meaning.

These false friends can cause confusion for learners of either language because the loanwords or cognates have shifted in meaning in Japanese usage compared to their original English meanings.

References

• False Perceptions in Remote Negotiations Influenced by False Friends. A Negotiating Experiment Using Common European-English False Friends

• ChatGPT: Detection of Spanish Terms Based on False Friends

• Cross-Listening of Japanese, English and French social affect : about universals, false friends and unknown attitudes

• Semantic Analysis of «False- Friends»: A Case Study of English and Siin Seereer

• TRANSLATION OF FALSE FRIENDS AMONG B2 LEVEL ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS

• False Cognates and Friends between English and Kurdish

• Masked priming investigation of cross-linguistic “false friends” with Japanese EFL learners

• Automatically Building a Multilingual Lexicon of False Friends With No Supervision

• False Friends and other Enemies the Interference of English(L2)in German(L3)Language Acquisition for Japanese Learners

• Metaphor and Metonymy as a Source of False Friends in Spanish and Standard Modern Greek

• Analyzing Semantic Change in Japanese Loanwords

• Japanese Idiom Learning through Cognitive Linguistics Concept (Idioms Presentation)

• A corpus-assisted analysis of indexical signs for (im)politeness in Japanese apology-like behaviour

• Investigating a Japanese Authenticity-Blurring Mechanism in Discourse: “It’s the Mood which has the Last Say in Our Discussion.”

• Exploring wordplay and humour in English usage within Japanese texts