One of the really cool things about this language is the absolute abundance of onomatopoeia. The classic examples of these in English are words like meow, oink, and buzz. In English these kind of words tend to be animal or sound-efecty sounds (think pow, bam, tic toc et cetera).
Onomatopoeia are always better in bright, overbearing colors.
Well, Japanese takes this to a new level.
Rather, Japanese has a really rich and expressive vocabulary of these, and (for English speakers) they get used regularly in surprising and exciting ways. One cool example of this is different types of rain have different words. Rain that is zaa-zaa-ing is coming down in sheets and waves. However, if it's just a light rain then it comes down in a para-para sort of way.
You might be saying, "That's great and all, but we have that stuff in English, too!" And, indeed, you're right. The whooshing rain. Or something like that. However, somehow the Japanese ones feel less ad-hoc and more varied, not to mention the prolificicity of their use.
Things start to depart from English even more with the sound of actions or emotional states. You are "moving around with liveliness" if you are iso-iso-ing, or if you feel uneasy you are odo-odo-ing, and if you pyon-pyon then you're jumping. One of my favorites is chu which is to give a sweet kiss on the cheek, like what your pet dog might do, except in his case he might use excessive amounts of dog slobber on said cheek. And a particularly intriguing example is the sound of silence and stillness, shin (usually pronounced sheeeeeennn ).
Chu!
Most of the time, there are also non-onomatopoeic counterparts for these words, and the onomatopoeic ones can be used as adverbs with the non-onomatopoeic verbs. For an example which you'll come across pretty quickly if you start studying Japanese, 日本語をぺらぺらしゃべる (nihongo wo pera-pera shaberu). The first word nihongo means the Japanese language, pera-pera is the sound of speaking fluently or without difficulty, and shaberu is "to speak". So that phrase could mean something like, "You speak Japanese smoothly."
You probably noticed that almost all these are a couple syllables repeated twice. Pera-pera, zaa-zaa, iso-iso. Well, there are in fact adverbs which aren't considered onomatopoeia but have the same form and are used in the exact same way grammatically. This makes these words typically pretty vivid and expressive. A good, common example is don-don which is to do something repeatedly, or "to keep on doing something."Another word like this seen somewhat often is iyo-iyo which is to do something "more and more" or "increasingly." You see it in phrases like, "It's getting colder and colder by the day." 日に日にいよいよ寒くなってきている (nichi-ni nichi-ni iyo-iyo samuku-natte kite-iru).
This seems to blur the line between onomatopoeia and "normal" words, which also seems to go hand in hand with the fact that onomatopoeia are part of everday Japanese speech. This is cool, because it lends a particularly vivid, experiential way of speaking and listening.
Onomatopoeia are vivid.
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There are actually technical terms for different types of onomatopoeia. I'm sure it's been torturing you up 'till now not knowing, so I'll swoop in and save the day.
擬音語 (gionngo) is the class of onomatopoeia that virtually all English ones fall under--all the sound-words of actual sounds, be they human or inanimate. If you're wanting to talk just about sounds produced by animate things then please make use of the word 擬声語 (giseigo). Again, English has this. The class which is most interesting for us English speakers are the 擬態語 (gitaigo), or the "sounds" of actions or emotions.
If your saying, "Ahhh! Holy bejeezus, Brandon. These words are arcanely difficult and we'll never use them. Ahhhh!" then let's take a look at all the kanji separately. It's really quite simple and elucidating.
First, take a look at those three words. Do you notice any characters in common with all of them? 擬 and 語. The first character means "mimic" or "immitate", as in the word 擬装 (gisou) which means "camouflage"--the second character there means "clothing" or "attire", so we get clothing which mimics (for the worst translation of the year award). The other character 語 is basically what you see at the end of all words for parts of speech, languages etc., so a loose translation would be "word" or "language". An example would be to combine 日本 (nihon - meaning Japan) and 語 to get 日本語 (nihongo), the Japanese language.
So, we have a word which mimics something. The other characters are what differentiate between the different terms. In 擬音語 (gionngo), we have 音 which basically means "sound". If you look at the individual character meanings, the word's meaning falls into place. Next, we have 声--from 擬声語 (giseigo)--which loosely means "voice", but it actually gets used for the sound of any animate object--be it a human voice, a bird's song or a dog's bark. Finally, we have 擬態語 (gitaigo) and the character 態 which means "attitude", "manner" or "behavior".
So, look back, combine the kanji and you can see how the meanings fit together. You also get a feel for how the at first scary-looking and confidence-deflating kanji characters begin to develop senses of meaning (and even senses of pronunciation) through the course of studying. Thus, you can come across crazy combinations of characters that you've never seen before (朝鮮民主主義人民共和国, for example) and decipher or get a feel for the meaning. Since you're wondering, it means The Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
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