Japanese That’ll Make you Sound Really Good – May Rain
If you want to sound cool, you need to use special names for the months. 一月、二月、五月 – this is boring. Try calling May 皐月 (さつき). But don’t just stop there. You want to talk about the special rain in May that signals the changing of seasons, 五月雨 (さみだれ). If you can read this, it’s impressive. If you can use it in samurai fashion, it’ll turn heads.
五月雨じゃ濡(ぬ)れて参(まい)ろう
Let’s go get wet in the May rain.
The weather is getting warmer. You don’t need an umbrella. You are a cool samurai.
Try this out the next time you are walking with a Japanese person in the rain in May. They may just fall in love with you…
Manga artist, overseas culture lover, and wants to show all the fun and strange origins of the Japanese language.
It’s also a pretty useful word to know for business Japanese, where it’s used to mean continuously:
As an example from an actual email sent to me by a Japanese colleague: “原稿は1/27から2/16にかけて章ごとに五月雨で入稿する予定です。”
It really confused me the first time I saw it, I was wondering what rain had to do with anything!