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Hi, my name is Hachiban and this is my podcast.
Anyway, Ramen, gyoza and a bit of chaos. I haven't been doing this podcast for so long but
getting back to it now. Today I'm gonna talk about a Japanese term, kusa. Kusa means weed.
It also means any grass sort of plants and it's also used like lol as internet slang.
So when someone says funny then someone else might say kusa.
And yeah, it's like used as lol, laugh out loud. And why Japanese people do that?
Why do they say weed when they think something is funny? To explain that it takes a bit of time but
I will try doing that in this episode. So people used to say warai to show lol in Japanese.
Warai simply means laugh. So originally people have been using kakko warai. So that's the
character, Chinese character or kanji meaning laugh, warai. And it's in brackets. So when someone
thinks something is funny we put kakko warai. But then people started being lazy,
people didn't want to type kakko warai kakko all the time. So
people started omitting brackets. Then so it was just warai, the kanji character.
warai. But then people have, people get lazier and lazier and they just started
typing warai in katakana instead of kanji. So by doing that you don't have to
hit space to change romaji into kanji. Because Japanese people normally type in romaji.
And when they need to change it to katakana or kanji, they hit space to change it. Well,
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if it's katakana it's actually F7, that's the quickest way. But anyway, space does the job too.
But then often one word might have lots of different kanji. So sometimes you have to
keep hitting space to get the kanji you want to use. So yeah, changing to kanji can be a bit
annoying. So then people started to use warai or wara, even shorter, in katakana instead of
warai in kanji to show LOL in Japanese. But then people thought even that katakana,
I mean wara in katakana is even annoying or too long. So people started using W instead.
So that's the short for warai. The first alphabet of warai is W because it's W-A-R-A-I.
They started using W. And then when people think something is really really funny,
they started putting lots of Ws instead of just one W. So I might just type something.
Oh, that's so funny, www in Japanese. And when people saw those lots of W letters,
they thought, ah, it looks like grass, like weed or grass just sprouting or just growing
at the end of the sentence. So then instead of saying W, people started using the kanji
kusa to show weed. Also to show how something is so funny, some people started saying daisougen.
Daisougen means big grassy field. By saying that, it's expressing there are so many Ws.
I don't know whether I'm explaining it properly, but that's how it became. People started using
Ws or kusa to show how something is so funny. So if you were asked by someone,
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hey, do you know why Japanese people say weed when they think something is funny? And then
you can say, oh, that's so annoying to answer that question. It's too long to explain.
Or you can simply say, hey, listen to this episode of this podcast. Then you can understand,
hopefully. And that's it for this episode. And thanks for listening. Bye for now.
