By translator and writer Jamie Graves<\/strong> (Saitama-Ken 2002-2003)<\/em><\/p>\n The Google Honyaku group<\/a> has a great discussion going on trying to pin down exactly what physical sensation <\/em>karai<\/strong> <\/em>(\u8f9b\u3044) refers to.<\/a> The easiest English analogy is “spicy<\/strong>“, and it’s often used to refer to hot foods, but as I learned from a few years of working in restaurant kitchens in Japan, the word can also refer to anything that’s a little too salty, too strong (dark Belgian beer with a high alcohol content) , or strongly flavored (sun-dried tomatoes).<\/p>\n People even provide examples of native Japanese speakers (NJS’s) using karai<\/em> to describe such disparate flavors as minty Colgate toothpaste or cola.<\/p>\n As Marc Adler ably sums it up, “Anything that is over-stimulative of the mouth gets labeled as ‘karai.’ I think we just don’t have a single word in English that covers all of karai’s lexical bases.”<\/p>\n Case in point, the word used to describe a dry wine is kara-kuchi<\/em> (\u8f9b\u53e3), which isn’t by any stretch of the imagination “spicy”. Laurie Berman supplies an excellent and concise theory about this:<\/p>\n My impression is that [karai] <\/em>\u8f9b\u3044 and [amai, <\/em>“sweet”] \u7518\u3044 are regarded as opposites, and\u00a0 as a result, [amai<\/em>] \u7518\u3044 can be used to mean “not [karai<\/em>] \u8f9b\u3044,” and [karai<\/em>] \u8f9b\u3044 can sometimes be used to mean “not [amai<\/em>] \u7518\u3044”–which is how I interpret [karai<\/em>] \u8f9b\u53e3.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Does anyone else have an example of an unusual food that they heard a native Japanese speaker refer to as karai<\/em>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By translator and writer Jamie Graves (Saitama-Ken 2002-2003) The Google Honyaku group has a great discussion going on trying to pin down exactly what physical sensation karai (\u8f9b\u3044) refers to. The easiest English analogy is “spicy“, and it’s often used to refer to hot foods, but as I learned from a few years of working […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t