Pika-Pika, Doki-Doki, Bata-Bata: Why Japanese Has a Word for Every Feeling You Can’t Describe.

A Russian friend once said something that stuck with me.

“Japanese has so many words that repeat themselves. Chika-chika. Mogu-mogu. Fura-fura. What is that?”

I’d never thought about it. I’d been using those words my entire life without questioning why they existed.

Good question, though. Why do they?

First, what are we actually talking about?

Japanese has hundreds — probably thousands — of these doubled-up words. Some copy sounds: wan-wan is a dog barking, za-za is heavy rain. That part exists in English too. Buzz, crash, meow.

But Japanese goes much further.

Doki-doki is the feeling of your heart beating fast — excitement, nervousness, the moment before something happens. There’s no sound involved. It’s a feeling, expressed as if it were a sound.

Waku-waku is anticipation. The fizzy, slightly restless energy of looking forward to something. Again — no sound. Just a sensation, given a name that feels like what it describes.

Fura-fura is the dizzy, unsteady feeling of being about to faint. Pika-pika is the way something sparkles when it’s clean and new. Shiin is the sound of silence. Which, technically, has no sound at all.

That last one is my favorite. Japanese invented a word for the sound that silence makes. Or, if you prefer: the sound of one hand clapping.

Why does this matter?

Most languages name things. Table. Run. Angry. Happy.

Japanese does that too — but it also goes one level deeper. It names the texture of things. The quality of an experience. Not just “I’m excited” but the specific fizzy-restless-forward-leaning feeling that excitement has.

My kid is two years old. When I ask if something hurts, sometimes the answer doesn’t come easily. But “zuki-zuki?” — the throbbing kind of pain — gets an immediate nod. “Chiku-chiku?” — sharp and pokey — gets a different one.

These words feel as if they bypass explanation and go straight to sensation. That’s why they work on two-year-olds. That’s why they work on adults too, even when we don’t notice.

Why does Japanese have so many of them?

Honestly, no one has a single clean answer. But a few things probably contributed.

One is that English often packs manner into the verb — stroll, stride, stumble, shuffle. Japanese often keeps the verb simple and adds the texture beside it. The language found a different solution to the same problem.

Another is manga. Manga didn’t create these words, of course — they existed long before modern comics. But manga made them visually loud, playful, and endlessly extendable. Japan’s comic culture has been amplifying and extending sensation-words for over a century — words for tension, for silence, for the feeling of a scene getting serious. Some of those words escaped the page and entered everyday speech.

This isn’t a “Japanese is better” argument.

Different languages are good at different things. English is precise about time — the difference between “I did,” “I have done,” and “I had done” tells you a lot about when and how something happened. Japanese is less fussy about that, but more expressive about how something felt.

Neither is superior. It’s like asking whether it’s better to have brown eyes or blue eyes. The answer is that they’re different, and both work fine.

What Japanese onomatopoeia tells you is something about the people who developed the language — that expressing the texture of experience mattered enough to build hundreds of words for it.

The next time you hear a Japanese person say something twice — hara-hara, niko-niko, bura-bura — they’re not stuttering. They’re being precise.

Just in a different direction than you might expect.

All of the above is one Japanese person’s interpretation. Treat it accordingly.