Every now and then I think about how one of the last things my Japanese teachers in college told me was that no one would correct my Japanese in Japan. Only now, many years later, do I feel like I fully understand what they meant by that.

You always see non-native Japanese speakers complaining about being told that their Japanese is good, and the reason for that is because being told that you’re good at something comes with the implication that you still have a ways to go.

It’s encouragement, but it can be disheartening when you’ve already put in a great deal of time and made a great deal of progress in something, especially something like a language.

In many ways, it’s a milestone when people stop complimenting you.

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minami

@sakaimii

Feb 2, 2022

So there’s this food manufacturer named 紀文 (“kibun”) that was @‘d by another company that cheekily apologized for calling it “Norifumi” (another way to read 紀文) by saying “Sorry for calling you Norifumi, Norifumi”

This led to Kibun angrily replying with “It’s Kibun!!!!”

This in turn led to a bunch of people responding at Kibun jokingly implying its name is varying words ending with “bun”, with Kibun being like, “NO, you’re talking about “tabun”!” Or “That’s “kobun”!!!

And the entire reason this is funny is bc it’s the schtick of this comedian named Kojima, who is always called the wrong name and responds in the same way, angrily shouting, “It’s Kojima!!!”

So someone calls Kibun “Oshima”, and Kibun goes “No, it’s Ko—knock it off!!” LOL

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minami

@sakaimii

Feb 2, 2022

The point about language usage in lrt is really good as well. Translating Citron had a great deal of those issues as well, since so much of his speech was dependent on Japanese turns of phrases. You could keep them the same but then the reader would miss the point entirely.

And most of the time it wasn’t about the specific word or phrase itself—it was what he was trying to say with it and how getting it wrong made it sound unintentionally (or perhaps somewhat intentionally) funny because of that difference.

In truth, most his malapropisms were so complex that they were proof of how much he knew, which was always interesting to consider. So most of the job had to do with finding turns of phrases or words that would work appropriately for whatever he was saying at the time

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minami

@sakaimii

May 3, 2021

The whole conversation about slang got me feeling a bit sad because I find a lot of the slang in Japanese really creative, so let me go into a few aspects of JP slang that I personally like:

New verbs are constantly being added to the lexicon. Take “tapiru”, for example.

A couple of years ago tapioca/bubble tea exploded in popularity, particularly with young people. People were going out for it so much the verb “tapiru” was coined to express the act of having or going out for bubble tea!

There’s also convenient stuff like misuru (to make a mistake), and disuru (to insult someone). I particularly like disuru because it’s literally taken from “diss” which is slang in English to begin with. It’s like inception slang.

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