One thing that Japanese did really well is keeping their language identity. In particular, they don’t translate their words. They give us gyoza instead of dumplings. They give us ramen instead of some lame-ass noodle. They give us Sudoku instead of number puzzles. So much so that Japanese words have some kind of zen-like connotation to many people. In contrast, mainland Chinese always translate words to English. Ironically, gyoza is literally Chinese word 饺子，and Ramen is really the Chinese word 拉面。
Is this something that's happening because of something Japanese people are doing or because of the perception of Japanese culture where foreigners like Japanese words and thus don't translate it?
I think a big part is that Japanese is a lot easier to pronounce for westerners. We won't get it fully right but there are no tones and it transliterates to English pretty well, compared to pretty much every other Asian country.
Japanese has a lot of loan words from Chinese, which isn’t surprising. They aren’t even written in katakana. Japanese are more likely to adopt phonetic translation of new things (like computer) whereas Chinese will make a new word diannao (electric brain). Of course Chinese not having an auxiliary phonetic writing system (unlike Japanese or Korean) makes this necessary, although that’s probably by design (not completely true, some non-Chinese languages use Chinese as a phonetic writing system!).
Sounds like you're describing how English speakers treat Japanese loanwords, which sounds more relevant to the identity of English rather than Japanese.
From what I've heard, the Japanese has no qualms about importing English words or just making up "nonsensical" new English words to suit their needs.
Yes, but I thought it was Japanese culture that drives such adoption. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain why English vocabulary does not include many modern Chinese words in similar fashion, but does include a number of Cantonese words.
Oh please. Look and see some example Mandarin and Cantonese words loaned to English. [1] They also have your Japanese examples in there.
Want more counterexamples? Probably literally every Italian food: spaghetti, pizza, ravioli...
To me, this is just more evidence for how strong this meme of Japanese uniqueness, coolness, "sugoi kawaii desune~~ ^-^" is. I'm not bashing people who think Japan is cool. But I do think it's weird how they can't recognize it's just a meme, to the point of fetishization.
Did you notice that most of the words, if not all, are based on Cantonese. Hence I was careful to say "mainland Chinese". The early immigrants were mostly from Guangdong and Fujian. They didn't translate their words but to use phonics directly and I wish the mainland Chinese did the same. A good example could be the Japanese word katana。If it were from mainland Chinese, you'd bet the word would be "Chinese sword" instead of "jian" or "dao".
I mean, those are not new words. Languages more often than not take the foreign name of a new discovery/item/concept, and Japanese is no different. As sibling commenter mentions, they have a huge amount of English words written with katakanas.
Some languages had periods where they tried finding a new, “pure” name for a foreign concept/item, but these have varied success rates, and often sound idiotic to native speakers, and they don’t see the point.
