甘えん坊 – I am not spoiled, I am an amaenbo
Spoiled is not amaenbo. The word 甘えん坊 derives from the word 甘える which can mean to be affectionate toward someone, to rely on someone to take care of them, to demand or accept kindness from someone, etc.
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甘えん坊 does not mean Spoiled
甘えん坊 or 甘えんぼ is often translated as spoiled. Some 甘えんぼう can be spoiled but this is wrong. If you call someone spoiled, this suggests that someone has harmed them by giving them too much. The word 甘えんぼう does not suggest any sort of harm from being over-indulged.
Don’t Blame your Parents
Instead, 甘えんぼう is more about the traits of the person making the demands and not the person giving in. So, if you say a child is ‘spoiled’ it suggests that the parents spoiled the child. 甘えんぼう just refers to a person or even an animal that is affectionate, demanding of attention or is dependent on someone else. This does not say anything about the actions of someone else. They may or may not be getting what they want in return.
How do you say Spoiled then?
If you want to ‘spoil’ someone you can use 甘やかす which can mean to spoil or to pamper someone. So there is a difference between The following two sentences.
猫が甘やかされている
The cat is spoiled
その猫は甘えん坊だ
The cat is an Amaenbo
Fro the second sentence if you want to translate Amaenbo, you could say a number of things. Pampered, affectionate, loving, indulge in its owner’s generosity, or whatever.
This should be a Loanword in English
Many years back when I first got my cat I was talking to another cat owner. She was explaining to me how after neutered male cats become very…loving? Affectionate? Demanding? She could not quite pick the right word to describe it. I knew what she meant though. She wanted to say that they become an Amaenbo.
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Or, If you want to learn more Japanese words, check out my hard to translate Japanese words.
That was very helpful. I was looking for a term in English for this word. Currently I write a little Fancomic and since I play a lot of Japanese Otome games /listen to drama CDs or watch Anime I sometimes have these typical words in mind. I know the meaning behind it but somehow can´t find the right term or if it would be a too long sentence instead of one word. The simple definition of a dictionary feels like it´s lacking something sometimes. Don´t get me wrong I know I am not good in Japanese but I think I get a bit of the feeling for the use of some words in some situations. What I find extremely interesting is somehow which impact the way something is said has a completely different impact. For example it feels like Japanese can sound very polite but when you know the wording you can hear like how the speaker distances himself from this person or is talking down on someone. When I watch dubbed Anime some translations feel so wrong. The words might be right but not the actual meaning. I am sorry if my English is weird it is not my first language I am from Germany. Thank you for the information I am sure to read more.
Hello Nina!
Your English is great! No need to apologize. If I tried to use the little German I know, then that would be a different story, haha.
Anyway, in regards to Japanese words, that is my impression too. The dictionary is very helpful, in fact when learning Japanese that was how I acquired most of my words in the beginning. But, it is definitely incomplete. I was able to learn a bunch of words but it requires context and understanding the small nuisances of those words to really know when to use them and what they mean. I find if you look up a word in a Japanese to English dictionary you basically just have a list of definitions without any real explanation. When I first learned Japanese the way I did, I was able to speak but was constantly needing to be corrected. Being told no one uses that word, that word does not make sense in this situation, or that is not quite what the word means. At least having lots of example sentences are great! But, I think that listening to music, watching Anime, Dramas or talking to people directly is what helps to clear up the confusion.
After some time though, you also do start to get a sense of if something feels correct or not even without having to consider context. So, it sounds like you may already be at that point or very close!
Thank you for your comment, I am really happy to hear that this was helpful. I know everyone’s experience of learning Japanese is different and love to hear your perspective! Thanks again!
Thank you so much for your kind words. Could you maybe help me to find a book for practicing Japanese? I don´t mean a normal book for learning. I found it much more helpful and motivating to read storys so I am looking for a book with Furigana so I can look up things I still can´t read. It´s very difficult to find something. I know even some Manga and Novels and not only books for (small) children have those. The problem is I don´t know how to look for them. The interst for the story, a bit like solving the riddle is what entertains and motivates me a lot.
For me learning Japanese is a hobby because it´s such a beautiful language, the voiceactors and artists are amazing, the culture is fascinating and as I mentioned I wanted to really understand the stories I read and watched. Even if you don´t know Japanese you can often tell that something is odd or missing in some szenes watching the dubbed version. With a bit of understanding I can at least understand the later in some situations. Writing to a Japanese friend on Twitter I was astonished how much information she could put into one Tweet-not only that sentences are often shorter this 1Kanji being one word also played a big role. It´s interesting that if you know the meaning of some Kanji how you might be able to understand/read a word you didn´t know before. I hope it´s okay to add this here but as an example for translation problems even if I was able to understand the words “首を洗ってまつ” I had to look up the actual meaning behind the sentence and because of my joy finding it it´s easy to remember now. The only thing that got me confused at first was a gesture. It´s this waving your hand to make someone come closer. In Germany and I think other cultures as well it´s used to shoo someone/something away and it irritated me that people not only not walked away instead even came closer. After finding out the actual meaning a ghoststory made so much more sense. I thought what a kind ghost it was for warning people to not get too close to the lake because it´s dangerous and couldn´t understand why it was told to be evil. Kind regards Nina
I do certainly understand how furigana is a life saver for learning Japanese. Unfortunately I don’t believe there is much out there that is made for native speaking adults that is going to have furigana. As Japanese people learn Kanji for years, depending on the age group that the books are written for they may have furigana above some of the harder kanji for that age group. There maybe graded readers out there, or books written for Japanese learners in mind which has everything with furigana above it. I am not sure though and will need to do some research on that. One option though is to use a plug in on the computer like, 10ten which you can hover your mouse over and it shows you how to read the words and definitions. I wrote an article about it if you think this may work for you.
https://japaneseuniverse.com/2021/11/11/why-you-should-use-10ten-japanese-reader/
What I had to do personally when learning Japanese was take a large chunk of time to focus on just learning Kanji. I set a goal of learning the basic 2,000 or however many Kanji that are part of the Joyo Kanji. I then broke down a number of Kanji characters to learn per day and then after a year I was able to read quite a bit. I did not always know the reading of everything, but just being able to know what a character meant was able to help quite a bit in comprehension, like you mentioned. Here is a list of the current Joyo Kanji as reference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_j%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji
When I get a chance I will do some research into what options are available and probably write an article that goes into more detail. But for now, I think that 10ten would be the best option if you want to read native content.