Olympics in Japanese – Water Sports: 飛込、競泳、水球
The Tokyo Summer Olympics in Japan runs from July 23rd to August 8th. As always there will be a lot of sports in the water. Keep reading to learn about talking about these sports and the Olympics in Japanese.
INDEX
Most Words for the Olympics in Japanese are English
Most sports words in Japanese are the same in English. So, to make it easy let’s knock these out of the way first:
- アーティスティックスイミング – Artistic Swimming
- マラソンスイミング – Marathon Swimming
- カヌー – Canoeing
- セーリング – Sailing
- サーフィン – Surfing
- ボート – Rowing
Other than rowing all the English words are the same. ボート is of course from the English word boat.
https://japaneseuniverse.com/2024/02/18/pac-man-in-japaneseconcepts-behind-development-to-global-icon/Olympics in Japanese – 飛込、競泳、水球
Finally, we have three words for sports at the Olympics in Japanese. These are unique to Japanese.
飛込 – Diving
飛込 means diving. The word literally means to jump into. So in the case of diving, this would be jumping into the water.
競泳 – Swimming
We already had Artistic Swimming, and Marathon Swimming mentioned above. For just Swimming though we use a different word, 競泳. This word actually could be translated from Japanese to English as competitive swimming.
In everyday Japanese, there is another word, 水泳 which also means swimming. So, 競泳 refers to swimming as a sport where 水泳 refers to just swimming in general.
水球 – Water Polo
Water Polo in Japanese is 水球. This word is made of two characters. First is 水 meaning water then 球 for balls or round things. The 球 character you will see often in the name of sports since lots of sports involve passing some kind of ball around.
