Native Tongue: What Your Style Is Trying to Tell You!

What’d you say?!

Wait, did you mean dance or grab some chips and indulge in tomato deliciousness? I mean, either way, we are talking about salsa, aren’t we?

Words matter. The culture of a martial art is encapsulated in both its movements and its original language. From stances to poetic form names, words carry meaning and meanings give movements their proper intention.

Hey Mr. Karate-ka! What are kicks called in Japanese?

If you think about how roundhouse kicks are called mawashi-geri and side kicks are called yoko-geri, you may come to the conclusion that kicks are called geri.

That answer is absolutely, positively, supercalifragilisticexpialidociously...wrong.

Utterly wrong, in fact.

The correct answer would actually be keri. Note the “K” instead of the “G”. By itself, geri means “diarrhea”. Keri is the word that translates as kick, the beginning sound simply transforms to a “G” sound when it is used as a suffix to another word (such as “yoko” or “mawashi”).

Tsuki is another one such word that often gets misused. While when used in the context of martial artists discussing techniques, tsuki can translate to “thrust”, it can also be written out with characters that mean “love” or “month” or “moon”.

Again, not the kind of misunderstanding you want to have while speaking to your teacher’s teacher. The last thing you want to do is start asking your grand-teacher about his monthly diarrhea (unless, I suppose, you just have that kind of relationship with him...).

Beyond the potentially humorous and unflattering situations you can avoid, a better grasp on the native language and lingo of your art helps you effectively dissect and communicate the ideas as they are presented to you. Kung fu tactics will often have poetic names that hint at the subtle nuances of their movements and even American Kenpo will guide you in a pedagogically effective manner if you listen and understand the technique names.

Here’s an example that is going to change your training as much as cheese sauce changed nachos and fries: Horse stance isn’t the actual name for that posture your teacher lovingly tortures you with.

At least, it isn’t always the appropriate name.

If you study a Traditional Chinese Martial Art, the word that often gets used when discussing stances, “Bù”, actually translates more precisely to “stages in a process” or “step”.

Stances are about movement, not stillness.

Dissolve the aesthetic movie postures you’ve got in mind and start prioritising the transitions instead of the poses themselves. It is about how you change your distribution of weight, balance, and position in relation to the opponent that matters.

Here’s a mind-exploder: a stance is no different from a captured frame in a film.

While stances can be used to reinforce yourself with stability, understand that this is far from being their only use.

Fights are as dynamic and hectic as Taz the Tasmanian Devil hopped up on a Bang energy drink. This is true now and this was true when martial artists like Gichin Funakoshi and Gu Ru Zhang were alive and teaching.

Sure, you can master kick-butt movements without giving a dang about the names of your punches and kicks. Heck, you could even train decades without giving your martial art system a name.

But...if you want to build on the knowledge your martial art forefathers already dug up, I advise that you look into everything they left behind for you.

Learning your martial arts mother tongue helps you better understand what your martial art ancestors are trying to tell you.

Are you curious on what other discoveries you might have been missing out on? To help you get begin learning your martial art mother tongue, I’ve packed together a brief language guide to help you get started!