Onomatopoeia in Action Part 2

Following on from my earlier post about remembering sound symbolic words, here's another story with 10 more examples in context and yes, I used onomatopoeia in the title because that is what everyone uses as a search term!

Saturday morning. Hungover again. My head throbbed (ガンガン　していた）and my mouth was dry. I rolled off my futon, stood up, and immediately felt dizzy(フラフラ　した）. I shuffled to the kitchen, took a 2 litre bottle of Pocari Sweat out of the fridge and gulped down (ゴクゴク　のんだ) about half of it. It was raining outside (ザーザー　あめ　が　ふっていた）and I couldn't be bothered doing anything constructive so I spent the morning just lounging around (ゴロゴロ　していた) the TV room.

Towards the late afternoon I was feeling a bit better so I decided to clean up. I collected all of the empty beer cans 、picked up fragments of uneaten potato chips off the kotatsu and and wiped it down until it shone (ピカピカ　に　なった）. The doorbell rang. It was Mayumi, a friend of mine from the gym.  She was holding a couple of videos. I kind of fancy Mayumi so I came over all nervous (ドキドキ　していた） "C..c..come in!"　I said.

I hadn't finished cleaning. There were clothes, books and bits of party debris everywhere. Mayumi took one look and said "What a mess!" (グチャグチャ　だね！）before helping me to tidy up.

We watched one video and then Mayumi said "I'm a bit peckish" (ペコペコ　だよ) so I made a curry, opened a bottle of wine and we sat on the sofa watching the second video. Towards the end of the movie we had finished the wine and I worked up enough courage to say "Mayumi, would you like to go out to dinner next week?"

There was no response.

"Mayumi?"

But she was fast asleep, snoring gently. (グーグーねていた）

Notes
1. ガンガン: gan gan refers to a throbbing pain.　
2. フラフラ: fura fura is an unstable movement, swaying, reeling etc
3. ゴクゴク: goku goku is the sound of drinking big gulps of a cold beverage - think  water, juice or softdrink. You can use goku goku for beer but iki iki is more common in cases where the English would be "chug" or "skull".
4. ザーザー: rain goes zaa zaa. It just does. Normal, non-torrential rain that is.
5. ゴロゴロ: when you want to say you were just hanging out at home doing nothing in particular that's when you use goro goro. A cat purring is also goro goro.
6. グチャグチャ: your house, handwriting and even your feelings can all be gucha gucha
7. ピカピカ: pika pika is the shiny clean you see on TV ads for cleaning products.
8. ドキドキ: when you have nerves before giving a speech, or get excited over seeing someone your heart goes doki doki.
9. ペコペコ: peko peko actually means you are really hungry - Mayumi was being polite.　
10. グーグー: if you make a noise, no matter how slight, when sleeping, you use guu guu.

Tags learning japanese | onomatopoeia | sound symbolic words | giongo | gitaigo　| 日本語　| 擬音語 | 擬態語

Comments

[Scott]

I love these posts. Onomatopoeia is one of the areas in Japanese that I've just avoided. There are so many things I'm terrible at in Japanese, that I've just leaving onomatopoeia until later. However, posts like these and the originator always make me interested in them all the more. I'd be interested to see a couple sample sentences in Japanese to get the hang of usage, placement, etc. Great post as always!