When you learn a language as different from English as Japanese is, you have to get used to concepts not always translating over on a 1-to-1 basis. There are separate words for white ducks (ahiru) and brown ducks (kamo), or for coldness in the air (samui) vs. coldness to the touch (tsumetai), and poor gaijin will invariably produce the wrong word to their general embarrassment. Often English loan words are modified slightly when they’re imported into Japanese. For example, the word for a strike in baseball is sutoraiku but a labor stoppage is a sutoraiki (ki on the end instead of ku), to avoid confusion. Some similar examples include gurasu for a glass of water but garasu for glass in a window, bureiku for taking a break when you’re tired but bureiki for the pedal you press to stop your car, or always using the word “fruit” in its plural form (furu-tsu) to keep it from being phonetically identical to the word “flute” (furu-to). Another classic one is their use of aian for “iron” when talking about the metal, including the golf club and the superhero Iron Man, yet the object used to make clothes look nice is transliterated as airon…a totally different word as far as the Japanese are concerned.
Different words for iron (the metal) and iron (the thing you use on clothes).
