[ranebo]

A year or so ago while my Japanese in-laws were visiting, my brother asked them if they would like to try a new swearing card game he was kickstarting(1). I was hesitant to let this happen as although my wife's parents didn't really know the meaning of the words, they knew they were "swear" words, and that might be seen as inappropriate.

In the end this was just my predefined view of what a "swear" word was, clouding my judgement, and everyone had a good time. My in-laws later explained to me that although they knew "swear" words were meant to be offensive, they couldn't wrap their heads around why/how, and as such happily yelled "Cunt!" as easily as they would "Potato!".

(1) http://www.f--kthegame.com/

[RodericDay]

I am very new at japanese, so don't take my word for this, but there aren't a lot of "motherfucker" style insults in japanese. You mostly insult people by talking to them with the wrong politeness level. The meaning of the word is still something like "you".

http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/insults.html

[ranebo]

Yep thats kind of my point, the idea that a word by itself, regardless of intent could be offensive, made absolutely no sense to them.

To put it into perspective, I've seen nearly every word on your list in different childrens cartoons/anime.

[harisenbon]

You are mostly correct, it is one of the more interesting things about Japanese that the context outweighs the use of the word in many situations.

That being said, there are a number of words that are NEVER appropriate out of starting a fight. Probably not as many as English, but I can think of about 20 or so off the top of my head.

[ekianjo]

Japanese insults are never as simple as the ones in US English. Its usually expressions rather than words alone.

But the best languages for swearing are probably the latin languages such as French Spanish and Italian. They have all very colorful expressions and a high variety of ways to express them. English and American English are extremely limited in comparison.

[omegaham]

There is a great passage from Feynman's autobiography, where he visited Japan for an academic conference and learned some Japanese from an American WWII occupation phrasebook. This was not well-received, and he couldn't figure out why until he started to learn Japanese from someone who actually spoke the language.

[mjklin]

As a linguist (Geoff Nunberg) once said on NPR, it is odd for native speakers to hear foreigners using curse words, since you know their mothers never washed their mouths out with soap for saying them.

[xerophyte12932]

Hahah very interesting game. My compliments to your brother