You Have Failed Me for the Last Time

Yes, it’s just as the title says, only by “you” I mean “my Japanese ability” and by “the last time” I mean “again.” You see, even for someone of my ridiculously large intellect, learning a foreign language can be a very frustrating thing. This is even more true when the language you are learning has a completely different alphabet (or 3), and uses completely different grammatical structures. Compared to Japanese, studying a language like Spanish seems easier than taking candy from an automatic candy dispensing machine. In Spanish you can say something like “El carro es rápido” and be immediately understood by most any English speaker, regardless of whether or not they have any experience with the language. The same is most definitely not true for Japanese, and it gets worse; the language itself isn’t the only obstacle you need to overcome.

You may or may not know this, but there are some slight cultural differences between Japan and, well, the rest of the world. I find that one of the hardest things for me to do in Japanese is to make well-formed replies to things that other people say to me. Most of the time, this is due to a gaping chasm in the landscape of my Japanese ability. Other times, it’s because I simply have no idea what to say, in English or in Japanese. To illustrate, here is a conversation I had with the doctor during my most recent doctor’s visit, translated from Japanese:

Doctor: Please, have a seat. What seems to be the problem?

Me: I have a cold. My throat hurts. I have lots of congestion.

Doctor: I see. It’s a cold, then.

Me: Yes.

Doctor: This will hurt a little.

Me: OK.

Doctor: (sticks a metal tube up my nose which very painfully sucks out the snot and possibly a portion of my brain.)

Me: Ouch!

Doctor: Yeah, it hurts, right? Hey look at this! (At this point he holds up the metal tube, which now has a very large trail of snot hanging from it. He looks at me expectantly.)

Me: …

Doctor: …

Me: …

Nurse: Wow!

Not having fully adapted to Japanese medical customs, I found myself completely unprepared for this situation. The nurse obviously knew what the proper reply was, and I was very grateful for her assistance. Without her, I’m not sure how the visit would have proceeded.

There is one cultural difference, however, that actually makes speaking Japanese a little easier, at least in some situations. Japan has a rich history of customs that are based largely on rituals or patterns. The inherent predictability of these incredibly deep and long-standing traditions can be great fun to exploit for personal amusement. For instance, every foreigner living in Japan knows the phrase “Nihongo wa jouzu desu ne!” The phrase, meaning “You’re Japanese is good,” is almost always one of the first things a Japanese person will say after having met a non-Japanese. Whether your Japanese is actually good or not has no bearing on this whatsoever. In fact, the other day my local bicycle parking lot attendant said this to me, before I had uttered even a single word to him. True story.

Armed with this knowledge, I took it upon myself to come up with some replies that are a bit more interesting than the standard “Arigatou gozaimasu.” One that I like to use goes like this, “Sou omitain desu kedo, zannennagara sonna koto wa nain desu.” This can be translated to something along the lines of “I would like to think so, but I’m afraid to say that that just isn’t the case.” The surprised looks are generally satisfactory. Of course, sometimes I prefer to go the other route. In these cases I might say something like “Hontou? Tabun, risu wa kutsu wo tabeta,” which means “Really? Maybe a squirrel has eaten my shoes.”