Basil and I are learning Japanese together, mainly for the purpose of deciphering the Gothic & Lolita Bible! We thought we’d share our gosurori vocab with you. You can try replicating the strokes – it’s a lot of fun.

The Japanese writing system has three components: hiragana, katakana, and kanji (derived from Chinese characters). In the examples below, the chunky, multi-stroke characters are kanji and represent concepts. The simplier, flowing scripts are katakana; each one makes up a phonetic syllable.

Asians are constantly mocked for being unable to distinguish “l” and “r” sounds (“I’m so ronery… oh so ronery…”). Alas, this is the case with “loli”, which comes out as “rori” in Japanese.

?? = Ro Ri

Add a qualifier before the “rori” and you’ve got the various style categories of Lolita fashion.

Did we forget to include some key words? Was anything lost in translation? Let us know in the comments!