Something I find particularly interesting (and cute) about languages are the various “sounds” people make to express feelings. Swedish and English are rather similar in this respect, but Japanese has some very cute and odd sounds to express things.
For one, “uhn” or “un” mean “yes” sort of like the English “uh-huh”. “Fun” means “hum”. Drawn out (”fuuun?”) it becomes something like “huh!”. “Eeee?” is similar to the English “Eeeeh?” and means confusion, but short (”eh”) it means “yes”.
I’m generalizing a bit here, but I think you get the point.

“Iya” means “no”, as opposed to the English “yah” sound, and the Swedish “ja”. “Iya da!” is very frequently expressed especially by kids or young adults, and is akin to “No way!” or “Never!” or “I don’t wanna!” etc.

(Speaking of young adults, by the by, my Japanese apparently sounds like that of an old Japanese male. I need to work on that…)

(I mean I need to work on making it sound even more like an old Japanese male. Who wouldn’t want to give the impression of being an old Japanese lad, anyway?)

It gets really interesting when you go into sounds that are very vague in English/Swedish, like “the sound you make when you’re trying to think of something”. Some say “uhh….”, others say “um…..”, yet others say “and…..” and so on. These sounds are more distinct in Japanese and go either “anooo…” or “eeetooo…”. Needless to say, I was very skeptical about these two until I heard a native Japanese use them for the first time. “Ano ne…?” means something like “hey…?” or “hey now…”. “Anooo” is a way to subtly call someone’s attention (”Um… … …. am I supposed to be in this class?”), but is also used to express the “uuuuuh….” that in English means “what the fuck are you saying/doing?” (disbelief, shock, etc).
I have not researched it one bit, but the origin of some of these sounds in Japanese seem logical enough. The word “ano”, for example, means “that [something]“, as in the sentence “ano hon” (”that book [over there where you are not]“).

One distinct situation where the sounds differ in Swedish, English and Japanese is expressing pain. In English, this is “ouch” or “ow!”. In Swedish this is “aj!”. In Japanese this is “Itai!”. Sometimes you hear someone going “Ow ow ow!!” (traditionally while jumping up and down and shaking their hand or whatever body part got caught in the fire). In Swedish this is expressed as well, in the same fashion, as “ajajaj!” but this becomes more of a sympathetic sound by an observer than an actual sound made by the wounded person. In Japanese the sound goes along the line of English, and sounds something like “Itatatatata…!”.

So, conclusively, if you see a Japanese person jumping up and down going “Itatatata!” you can now smile knowingly about it. If you have more “sounds” like these, please comment on this post. I’m sincerely curious about it.