When I first moved to Japan (for the second time), I went to an international party (kind of like a Japanese-Foreigner mixer).
At that party I met this girl named [I don't remember]. She was one of the shortest Japanese people I'd ever met. Regular proportions and everything, but just really short. She was quite pretty, too.
She was pretty cool, so we became friends, and we were talking on LINE a few days later, and I was probably asking her a million questions about Japanese or Japan or talking about how I want to go swimming in the Arctic Ocean someday. I don't really remember, and she told me I was 好奇心旺盛 (koukishinousei).
I think she said something like:
ニコは好奇心旺盛だね。
niko wa koukishin ousei da ne.
My first reaction was to suffer from kanji overload.
Then I looked up what would become one of my favorite Japanese words.
好奇心旺盛
好奇心旺盛
こうきしんおうせい
koukishin ousei
brimming with curiosity
If I were to translate what she said to me, I guess it would be something like:
"You're just brimming with curiosity."
Or maybe...
"You're such a curious person."
好奇心
好奇心 (koukishin) is the word for "curiosity" in Japanese.
If you look at the kanji, that makes total sense:
好 ([to] like) + 奇 (strange) + 心 (heart) → "a heart fond of strange things" → "curiosity"
...or something like that.
Here are some sentences with the word 好奇心：
旺盛
The other half, 旺盛 (ousei) kind of means like "brimming with; overflowing with."
This is a really cool word, because you can attach it to other words to mean "brimming with [word]."
The most common forms of this are 好奇心旺盛 ("brimming with curiosity"), which we're looking at in this lesson, and 食欲旺盛.
食欲旺盛 (shokuyoku ousei) means something like "having a huge appetite." In other words, wanting to eat a lot.
食欲 (shokuyoku) means appetite, and 旺盛 (ousei) means "brimming with," so it kind of makes sense, yeah?
If you're curious about learning a lot more Japanese than this, you should probably head over to NativShark.
Best of luck with your studies,
Niko
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