system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How can some words not translate to another language? If a word means something in one language, shouldn't it be easy to determine what that is in another language?
gpt
Not all languages have words for all concepts.

A famous example is the German word *schadenfreude*, for which there is no simple English translation. The English concept is "taking pleasure in the misfortune of others" but obviously that's an entire sentence in its own right, for something that can be expressed as a single word in German.

And sometimes things can be even less translatable. English-speakers tend to think of "blue" and "green" as separate concepts, but there are many languages which have the same word for both.