Cold on the outside, soft underneath.
Describes a person — usually a character — who is sharp and dismissive but secretly affectionate, with the warmth leaking out at key moments. Born in 2000s fan forums and now used about real people half-jokingly.
A blend of ツンツン (prickly, aloof) and デレデレ (lovestruck, melting). The word is the whole character arc.
Fan vocabulary. Perfectly normal among anime watchers, confusing to anyone else.
Reading a definition isn't the same as saying it to someone. Lingo Kaiava is a voice tutor set to Japanese — it uses ツンデレ the way locals do, corrects you in the moment, and never "fixes" the way real people actually talk into textbook Japanese.
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