Now that we've gone over “How do you say X,” all that's left is the phrase “What does X mean?” With these two phrases, you should be able to ask a Japanese person (who's pretty good at English) what anything means. In theory, with these two phrases you can already have a full conversation entirely in Japanese. Yeah, it might be a very painful conversation, and you're probably going to sound like a Neanderthal. But that's chill, yo. No worries.

Xはどういう意味(いみ)ですか。
X wa dou iu imi desu ka
What does X mean?

Let's look at a breakdown.

“X” means “sea monster” in Japanese.

No, I'm just kidding. X means X.

Although, while we're on the topic, do you know how a Japanese person would pronounce the following symbol: ✖ ??

How about this one: 〇 ??

✖ ＝ ばつ ＝ batsu = “wrong; incorrect; bad.”
〇 ＝ まる ＝ maru = “right; correct.”

If you ever take a test in Japanese, you should hope to get back a paper with lots of 〇 and not a paper with lots of ✖.

Japanese people will also often hold their fingers up like an “X” to indicate that you can't or shouldn't do something. One time I was about to pick up a little box of strawberries at Tsukiji fish market, and owner of the stall I was at crossed his arms into an “X.” That's when you know stuff's getting really serious. A very traumatic experience for me.

Also, getting further sidetracked, did you know that Japanese borrows the English word trauma? Only, their awesome rendition of English pronunciation makes it into トラウマ / to-ra-u-ma / “trauma.”

While in English we might say something like, “It was a traumatic experience,” in Japanese they would say something like トラウマになった (torauma ni natta), which literally means “(It) became trauma.” I was looking around on Ameblo, and I saw this blog post, which had the following sentence construction with トラウマ:

以前(いぜん)の恋愛(れんあい)がトラウマ(とらうま)になって
もう人ひとを愛あいすることはないと思おもっていた
izen no renai ga torauma ni natte
mou hito wo ai suru koto wa nai to omotte ita
I was so traumatized by my previous relationship,
I thought I would never be able to love someone again.

Okay, I'll stop being sidetracked now. Sorry…

I don't want to get into the habit of ascribing English words to every piece of a Japanese sentence that you come across, because it starts to be kind of a waste of time after a while. For the purposes of this guide, however, I thought that it might be helpful to break down each sentence thoroughly so that absolute beginners might feel just a little bit less overwhelmed by all of these strange sounds that I'm asking you to string together.

どう (dou) basically means “how.” And いう is the same as 言う (iu) we saw before, which means “to say,” right?

When the two are put together, they make their own unique word, どういう (douiu), which dictionaries kind of struggle to explain, calling it “somehow; how; in what way; why; what kind of.”

A lot of times, Japanese people will say どういうこと? (douiu koto?)

こと (koto) means “thing,” so if you translated this directly it would be something like “How thing?” Instead, we can put it into more natural English and say something like “What the heck?”

Though it's not strictly necessary, if you're a guy I'd recommending sticking a だ (da) onto the end of that, to get:

どういうことだ？
douiu koto da?
What the heck?

If you're super shocked about something, put いったい (ittai) in front of it. This sounds a bit more like…

いったいどういうことだ？
ittai douiu koto da?
What on earth? / What the hell? / What the f*&%?!

You hear this a lot in anime. I suppose it's because something unexpected is happening every 3 seconds or so. In such cases, いう (iu) is likely to be pronounced ゆ (yu).

I'm sidetrack city in this section, huh? Anyways, yeah, どういう (douiu) means something like “how” or “what the…”

意味 (imi) means “meaning.”

So now let's add all of those up…

Xはどういう意味(いみ)ですか
(X wa douiu imi desu ka)
↓
Xは // どういう // 意味(いみ) // です // か
↓
X // how // meaning // is // ?
↓
What does X mean?

Anytime someone says a word in Japanese that you don't know, just replace X with that word in order to ask them what it means. Here are 11 examples:

For the answers, see the Lesson #3, above, because these are all the same words. Here's an example of what a conversation with your teacher might sound like…

By the way, you can also say: Xとはどういう意味ですか (X to wa douiu imi desu ka). This version that includes と (to) is actually more “correct,” grammatically speaking. But people leave it out all the time, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.