謙虚さ

kenkyosa humility, modesty

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This term came up frequently in a conversation I was having, and because I hadn't ever heard it in conversation, I took a note to look it up later. It reiterates a common struggle for interpreters. Japanese, like English, has native words (called 大和言葉, yamato kotoba, in Japanese) as well as words that entered the language from Chinese (introduced by Chinese and Korean monks and diplomats during the latter half of the first millennium, CE). This is akin to words in English based in Saxon roots and words based in Latin and Norman French roots. As a listener, it is almost always faster to comprehend the native word. For Japanese, I think one of the reasons is that you are not struggling to recall the specific characters for the loan word to make sure you know the meaning, given the large number of homophones there are for loan words in Japanese. However, there are times when there is no simple native word or phrase to replace the loan word, and this is one of those cases. Now that I'm aware of how the word is used in a conversational context, however, it will be less of a struggle the next time it comes up.