世論 What Japan Thinks

Here’s an interesting look by DIMSDRIVE Research at one particular Japanese word, 面倒くさい, mendokusai, bothersome. The word can be literally translated as “the smell of trouble”, and I always internally translated it as “a pain in the bum”, thus the title of today’s post.

Demographics

Between the 28th of April and the 12th of May 2010 13,802 members of the DIMSDRIVE monitor group managed to make enough effort to fill in a private online questionnaire. 52.4% of the sample were male, 0.6% in their teens, 8.5% in their twenties, 28.1% in their thirties, 32.8% in their forties, 18.9% in their fifties, and 11.0% aged sixty or older.

Here’s one Japanese-English dictionary with a number of example sentences.

I often mutter mendokusai under my breath at work, usually at procedures at work that are far more complicated than they need be. I did spend five minutes typing out a description of one of the work procedures, but then realised that there’s another even bigger pain in the bum, but as it’s too mendokusai for me to type it out, tough!

I’ll stick with mendokusai throughout this article, because as you can see from Q2SQ1, there are many nuances.
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