Fun facts about the Japanese language (Part 1)

I love how the Japanese are always so polite in telling you that he/ she is (pardon the language) pissed about something. Especially when they start to combine their versions of English words to it.

You know that when a Japanese ends a sentence with the word ‘desu’ or ‘masu’, he is being polite. For instance, if I say something is really delicious, I can say ‘oishii!’ to friends and family but I usually add the word ‘desu’ at the end i.e. ‘oishii desu!’ if I’m talking to someone I’m not that close with or who is more senior.

At the same time, English words more often than not take a whole new form in the Japanese language. Due to the limited vowels in Japanese language, there is no way to form Japanese characters so that they are pronounced exactly like English. For a start, there is no ‘L’ in Japanese, but only ‘R’. So Japanese find it ‘Ri-A-Ri’ difficult to pronounce the word ‘Really’…. (There is also no concept of 'V', I was reminded by someone I met today...it is replaced by 'B' in Japanese. So a Kevin Costner becomes a Ke-Bi-N Co-Su-Na...)



It's a 'pubric' place here....

And every vowel in Japanese ends with the mouth shaping into either ‘a’, ‘i’, ‘u’, ‘e’ or ‘o’. There is therefore no Japanese way to pronounce English words that end with ‘d’ or ‘t’, since they stop the tongue from spurting out one of the above vowels. For instance, the word ‘stop’ would be pronounced as ‘Su-To-Pu’ and ‘Good’ would somehow become ‘Go~o~o~do!’. I found the ultimate Japanese version of an English word when trying to locate a McDonald's one day in Osaka. The Japanese has no clue what you are talking about when you ask them where McDonald's is. Now it is impossible for anyone not to know what is McDonald's, so I was convinced it was my pronounciation. Not until the 10th try did I FINALLY figure out that the ‘Ma-ku-do-na-ru-do’ was just 20m ahead on the left!!!

So imagine when a Japanese gets pissed at something (well, not really 'pissed pissed' which is really not that frequent...but you know..'fun pissed'), says an English word and ends it in a polite form because you are a foreigner.

The other day I was playing cards with 2 Japanese friends at a pub in Nozawa Onsen. Imagine our Japanese rivals..sleek like Unagi-s (that is, eels..), and calm like the Samurais, intently focused on their cards and treating the game with life-and-death seriousness. All were quiet...very quiet....as other people in the pub went about their other little games. The Japanese peeped at our poker faces from the corner of their eyes with much suspicion, deliberating on their next move. "Now, would it be this card..or maybe that card...."

And after all this deliberation, it was quite unfortunate (yet funny) that one of them had to pick THE killer joker card from the pile. At this level of seriousness, there really couldn't be a better way to break the silence than 2 words shouted in samurai-fashion as if in a lost battle (i.e. in a style like he was about to kill himself)...

......"SHI~~TTO~~ DESU~~~~!!!"

Did I already mention that encounters of extreme opposites are common in Japan?