Within the anime fandom, "monster girl," monster musume モンスター娘, is the name given to non-human fantasy game "monsters" turned into cute anime "girls." It's a sub-category of jingai musume 人外娘, which includes all "non-human girls," whether they're from games or not.
The word is also romanizedmonsutaa musume モンスター娘, and abbreviated monmosu もん娘. The musume 娘 part can mean "daughter," but in this case it means "girl." (see: suffix -kko っ娘)
In Japanese, gijinka 擬人化 means "anthropomorphization," the process of adding human traits to something that's not human. In anime, moe-gijinka 萌え擬人化, "moe anthropomorphization," refers to the practice of turning things into cute anime girls, or cute anime guys.
In anime, peachification, in Japanese Piichi-hime-ka ピーチ姫化, literally "Princess Peach-fication," is the term for turning characters into Princess Peach-like characters by putting a Super Crown on them. It's also spelled peachfication or peach-fication.
For reference, the Japanese name for Bowsette is Kuppa-hime クッパ姫, literally "Princess Koopa," and I'm writing this post, of course, because I think it's funny how the English name Bowsette and the Japanese name Kuppa-hime have almost nothing to do with each other.
If you don't know who Bowsette is, she's the gender-bent / rule 63 / nyotaika 女体化 version of Bowser that turned into a meme overnight this week. (it all began in 2018-09-19.)
In Japanese, doki doki ドキドキ is an onomatopoeia for the thumping sound of the heart. It's usually used in situations where someone falls in love, though it may also be used when they're excited, tense, anxious, and so on.
In Japanese, sometimes you have words that repeat themselves, they're the same thing said twice, like: hitobito 人々, iroiro 色々, betsubetsu 別々, marumaru 丸々, dandan 段々, hibi 日々, tsugitsugi 次々, itaitashii 痛々しい and so on.
When such thing happens, it's called reduplication, or choujou 重畳, the process of creating "reduplicative words," jougo 畳語, and it's not specific of the Japanese language. English has it too.
In this article I'll explain how it works in Japanese, and common effects it has on the meaning of words.
In Japanese, iteration marks are symbols which can be used to repeat parts of a word. The most common mark, 々, is written instead of a repeated kanji. The marks ゝゞヽヾ are written instead of a repeated kana. Besides those, there's also a long く mark, this thing 〻, and the ditto mark 〃.
In Japanese, the ditto mark (〃), called nono-ji-ten ノノ字点, because it resembles the katakana ノ twice, tenten てんてん, chonchon ちょんちょん, and officially onajiku kigou 同じく記号, works just like the English ditto mark: it's used when a part of one line is the same thing as the previous line.
The only difference being that English uses a ditto mark for each word repeated, while Japanese uses just one ditto mark for the entire repeated part.
This mark is unlikely to show up in manga, or in any dialogue text. It can show up in a school, an actual, real school, in class, when a teacher is writing on an actual blackboard, as well as in tables when you have multiple rows and cells of a row are the same thing as cells of the row above.
In Japanese, the symbols ゝゞヽヾ are iteration marks for kana (hiragana and katakana). They work just like 々 works for kanji, by repeating the character that precedes them, except that, while 々 is commonly used, ゝゞヽヾ are rarely used in modern Japanese.
The symbols ゝゞヽヾ are called ichi-no-ji-ten 一の字点, "character mark [that looks like] 一," but they're also known by the same names 々 has: kurikaeshi 繰り返し, odoriji 踊り字, etc.
Mimetic words, or ideophones, are words which mimic or evoke an idea. One kind of ideophone are onomatopoeia, which mimic sounds. But Japanese also features hundreds of non-onomatopoeic ideophones, like sappari さっぱり, yukkuri ゆっくり, kichinto きちんと, chanto ちゃんと, wakuwaku わくわく, pikapika ぴかぴか, nikoniko にこにこ, among others.
Onomatopoeia are words that imply the sound they sound like. That is, words like *bang*, the sound of a pistol firing. Or *meow* the sound a cat makes. In Japanese, such words are disturbingly common, so I'll dedicate this article to explaining them.
If you're looking for how to say "it" in Japanese, I've got some bad news for you: one of the things English has that Japanese doesn't have happens to be the pronoun "it." So there's no way for you say "it" in Japanese, as that word simply doesn't exist. The good news is: you don't need "it" in Japanese.
This happens because most of the time you need an explicit "it" in English, you can simply omit "it" and leave "it" implicit in Japanese.
Manga: Kobayashi-san Chi no Meidoragon 小林さんちのメイドラゴン (Chapter 2, トールと出会い)
Context: Kobayashi 小林 sees a dragon girl in maid clothes.
meido fuku...
メイド服・・・
Maid clothes...
yume? yahari yume ka?
夢?やはり夢か?
[Is it a] dream? As I thought, [is it a] dream?
But let me explain more about each use of "it" in English and what's done in Japanese instead.
In Japanese, the term Zettai Ryouiki 絶対領域, or ZR, literally "Absolute Territory" in English, refers to the space of bare thighs between the skirt and above knee-length socks.
Yes, seriously. That's what Zettai Ryouiki means. It's an anime trope.
In Japanese, the small katakanake ケ, ヶ, is a bit different from the other small kana, in that it's not usually read ke, but instead as ka か, ga が, or even ko こ. Similar to how the small tsu っ isn't read as tsu つ.
For example, ni-ka-getsu 二ヶ月 is how you say "two months," as in counting the months. It's not read ni-ke-getsu despite having a ke in the middle.
So I'm making an Android app for people who like anime and want to start learning Japanese. It helps memorize the hiragana and katakana. Utterly basic stuff and not really interesting for anyone who's already learned them, but should be useful for absolute beginners.