https://www.google.co.jp Conceptual Images in English and Japanese

皆さん、こんにちは！

As a language teacher, one piece of advice I always like to give students is--use Google search to understand concepts in the second language. Therefore, I have decided to experiment with this idea. Let's compare concepts in English and Japanese.

1) food  vs.  食べ物 （たべもの）

Oddly enough, this picture shows up in both searches; albeit it, the Japanese website is dated 2013, and the English website is dated 2014.

There are many similarities and differences. For example, hamburgers show up in the first row of both searches. Also, both show images that display a veritable cornucopia of foods that one might imagine.On the other hand, the Japanese search shows more "artistic" examples of food, while the English search is more likely to display explicit advertisements of fast food.






2) doctor vs. 医者　（いしゃ）

　This shared image is one of few that are similar. Not surprisingly, there are obvious racial differences in the images that are shown. The English Google is predominately Caucasian, with very few African or Asian. Also, if you scroll down, you will see the occasional "Doctor Who". At the same time, the Japanes Google shows almost exclusively Asian (presumably Japanese) doctors (expect the accompanying image). Humourously, both searches come up with a number of cartoonish images for doctors--albeit, the English images are mostly Caucasian, but the Japanese images vary between races and anthropomorphic images.




3) Fall vs. 秋

 This image search showed a lot of similarities. We see the red and orange leaves that are ready to fall off the trees. One very interesting difference is the food associations. The Japanese images will occasionally focus on the chestnuts that are ready to be roasted, while the English images show a great deal of pumpkins (which are, of course, associated with Halloween, Thanksgiving, and more recently pumpkin spice lattes...)







4) hot　vs.  あつい vs. 暑い

Wow! This is not what I expected...but maybe I should have. The English "hot" exclusively brings up pictures of scantily clad females (not surprisingly, mostly Caucasian--but some Asian, Indian, etc.--but rarely anyone of African decent). The hiragana version of "atsui" brings up mostly scantily clad cartoon images of females...However, the kanji form of "atsui" brings up the concept of weather and heat--that is a surprising difference from my perspective. Why would the form of the word (あつい　vs. 暑い) make such a difference? Well, it apparently does.

5) have fun vs. 楽しむ

I will let you interpret these for yourself. Starbucks is high on the list for the Japanese. However, the English search reveals mostly words art that expresses the sentiment...






Just remember, learning a language is all about having fun!  Enjoy!

じゃあまた！