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I have a 220 page book on Japanese onomatopoeia, not counting the index and bibliography. It's pretty interesting and there's just so much to learn about it - it's true, Japanese has soooo many onomatopoetic words. Onomatopoeia is used more often in daily speech in Japanese than in English
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Very true, but there's another gist to it: Japanese onomatopoeias don't sound rude. Most can be used in a formal context and you wouldn't get any eyebrow raise. On contrast, in most western languages, using an onomatopoeia like "zap", "boom", etc can be found to be terribly out of place in a formal context.