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Japanese has a great number of onomatopoeic words, which are essentially
sound-like expressions for describing different things for weather conditions
( **べたべた** , hot very humid sweat weather), over animals sounds ( **わんわん** ,
Dog sound, actually a valid word for "dog" for children), to some word which
describe more abstract things, such as **うろうろ** (wandering aimlessly)

There is a great list of examples
[here](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/japanese-onomatopoeia/) on Japanese
onomatopoeia.

I find this part of the language specifically hard to get since there seems to
be no pattern to how the words are formed? Also, always when i ask native
speakers of Japanese seem to quite agree on these word and i was wondering
where people actually learn them? I was theorizing about Manga being the prime
source of distribution, but would appreciate any insights on this.
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words expressions colloquial-language
How do people Japan learn about onomatopoeic words and why does everyone agree on most of them?
This is a partial answer only, but **children's books**. Books targeting
**kinder and first-grade kids** tend to have a very specific style ~ they are
generally hiragana only, use a lot of "kid speak" and informal Japanese, and
they are very heavy on mimetic/onomatopoeic words.
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I think わんわん・ヒヒーン・にゃー and so on are just animal sounds like you would have in
any language and like WeirdlyCheezy says probably come from children's books.

But...

>   * **うろうろ** could be a doubling of the two syllable noun うろ meaning "
> **empty** " with a dash of the word 迂路 meaning " **detour** "
>   * **ねばねば** is a doubling of the root of the verb ねばる meaning " **to stick
> to** "
>   * **ぱさぱさ** could be a doubling of the noun はさ which is **a rack for drying
> rice**
>   * **ぺらぺら** could be a doubling of へら meaning "flat" or " **smooth** "
>   * **ごろごろ** is a doubling of the root of the verb ころぶ meaning " **to roll**
> "
>   * **うきうき** is probably a doubling of 浮き meaning " **to float** "
>

So then these kinds of words would be produced from vocabulary that the native
speaker may already know and have kind of a sound-feeling for. But they sound
different and are used differently enough that to a native speaker it might be
hard to quickly connect one word to another sometimes.
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## Exactly the same as other words.

The thing about 擬音語{ぎおんご｝ and 擬態語{ぎたいご} (strictly speaking "onomatopoeia" only
describes 擬音語, though it's commonly used for both) is that to Japanese
speakers, they're just words like any other. How did you learn _helter-
skelter_ , _mishmash_ , or _bang_?

In other words, how people learn language, and why they agree on the more or
less arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning, are fascinating
questions that are far too big for this post, so for our purposes I'll just
say "the usual methods". That includes manga (and manga use a lot of them, for
roughly the same reasons American comics use a lot of "Bam!" and other words
to convey sound and motion), but also children's books, deliberate education
in school, and especially hearing the everyday conversations of adults.

Bonus fun fact: it's not quite true that there's no pattern to how they're
formed. Tolkien was a big proponent of the idea, now mostly out of fashion,
that there is a strong relationship between the sound of a word and its
meaning, and there is [modern
evidence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect) of this as well, at
least in some contexts. Specifically in Japanese, one volume of ダーリンは外国人 (a
slice-of-life comic with some interesting linguistic moments) explored the
idea that words like ゆれる (to sway or wobble) may actually come from ゆるゆる
("wobble-wobble"), not the other way around, and that may provide insight into
the formation of language; ゆるゆる "sounds right" for that activity in a way that
ピカピカ wouldn't, so maybe language is mostly made of progressively more
complex/obscure onomatopoeia. Not very scientific, perhaps, but intuitively
compelling and fun to think about. If true, these words may be easier to learn
because the relationship between sound and meaning is clearer, and therefore
more common in children's books and conversation, and less so with adults.
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