かりこりさく – Several ways to say crunchy in Japanese
Japanese is known for having a large amount of onomatopoeia or words that represent sounds. Beyond that Japanese has words that represent other phenomena such as emotions, movement, state of objects, and even textures especially for food. There is a huge number of words just for food texture, called 食感(しょっかん). There are even more words for texture than there are for the taste of foods. Today, I’m gonna focus on ‘crunchy’. In Japanese, you can express crunchy in a remarkable number of ways. Here are some of the more common ways.
INDEX
カリカリ
カリカリ is used to represent crispy and hard bready foods like toast or more often oily, deep-fried food. So bacon, deep-fried breaded chicken or fish, and so on. You can also use it for roasted nuts such as almonds, acorns, and other snacks that are hard and crunchy.
https://japaneseuniverse.com/2024/02/18/pac-man-in-japaneseconcepts-behind-development-to-global-icon/コリコリ
I don’t believe there is an exact English translation for this, but foods like chicken cartilage and pickled foods are represented with コリコリ. You would use this for hard but somewhat flexible foods. Outside of eating, this word also refers to stiff muscles.
サクサク
For crispy and crunchy bready foods like cookies, pie, crackers, senbei and other snacks, use サクサク. For pastries サクサク also has the meaning of flakiness. It can also refer to crisp foods like apples. Outside of food, the sound of サクサク is used to describe cutting vegetables or walking through snow.
パリパリ
Foods that are brittle and flat are パリパリ. So that would include seaweed, some cookies and of course potato chips.
There is still more
So now you can say crunchy 5 different ways in Japanese. This is not everything though. I plan to write more about Japanese onomatopoeias because they are just so interesting. If you think about these crunchy words, they sound like what they are representing, don’t you think?
So now that you know some crunchy words, If you want to learn more Japanese I reviewed a dictionary of grammar series which I personally recommend and use myself.
I also have several other posts on various topics on Japanese Universe if you are interested.
