Just a reminder that the puzzle from last week continues. I’ve had a large number of responses and will be giving away two beers next Friday.

I generally use the title of the puzzle as, to borrow a term from Click and Clack, obfuscation. The puzzle has nothing to do with farting. If you’d like to resubmit, please do.

The puzzle is here. 

Today’s puzzle is the very first video puzzle. It features my ugly mug – you have been warned. Good luck:

(P.S. The quality is pretty bad, but if you go to the actual youtube site, you can opt to watch it in high quality, which looks much better.)

Please do not post your answer in the comments. Send it to me via email or facebook. My email address is るぱんさんせい (romanized) at-mark gmail dot com. 

Junior year of college the chemistry of my Japanese class was a little poor. Maybe we were all too quiet or not confident with the language at that point, but eventually the professor started marking a participation grade each day. That definitely helped force us to talk. Looking back, I’m really glad she did that. She not only forced us to talk, she made us converse with each other, adding the appropriate 相づち (gestures, noises), which are actually quite important in Japanese. えっと, あのう, そうですね and あそうですか are all vital and will prevent a decent amount of discomfort on the part of your Japanese conversation partners. Part of learning any foreign language is learning these finer details. The hmming, ahhing, ohhing, mooing, and whawazzating.

Today I’ll be talking about the last of these today, which in Japanese is っけ.

It’s a conversational 文末 (sentence ending) expression that turns whatever comes before it into a self-addressed, monologue-y question. It’s beautifully efficient.

When I first learned it, I remember thinking that it was only ever used with the informal copula – だ and だった. But I catch myself using it with the formal copula (です, でした), and just recently heard a teacher use it with a regular old verb when he misplaced his chopsticks – 箸、どこに置いたっけ.

He had removed the saran wrap from his delivery katsudon, gotten up to fill up a mug of instant miso soup with hot water, and returned to his seat only to realize that he had misplaced his chopsticks. “Now where did I put those chopsticks…” he said to himself.

So, I guess you can attach っけ on to anything, really, but you most often hear it after the copula. 何だったっけ and 何だっけ are favorite phrases of Japanese students who can’t remember the answer to something (“Ah crap…what was it again?”).

In English, you could almost just translate it as “again”:

名前は何だったっけ。
What was his/her name again?

大正時代は、いつからだったっけ。
When did the Taisho Era start again?

By far, the most frequently used expressions are 何だっけ and 何だったっけ.

The speaker has some vague idea about what he is asking, but can’t recall it at the moment. That’s what っけ expresses.

The winner this week is Aleisha with her answer: "where did I put those chopsticks that I set down."

I had only one other answer. It was from Thomas, who said: “okay, so, clearly this statement was made by a burgeoning civil engineer, mumbled to herself at her desk.”

But he didn’t leave it at that, he wrote a 450-word short story. Here’s a piece:

it was late at night, nearly 1:30am, and all of naomi’s classmates had gone home. two lights clipped to the corners of her workbench provided the only illumination, two bright spots of white shining on the drafting paper spread out before her. the light was oblique enough that the weight of the paper was apparent– the thick grain showing shadowy textures beneath the brightly colored legos she had scattered about.

While it addresses the wrong はし, the っけ usage is appropriate ("okay," she said, focusing on the legos, her determination piqued once more. "bridge, where did i put you?"), and I believe it calls for an effort beer.

Here is the phrase for this week’s puzzle:

「はし、どこにおいたっけ。」

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

– explain the meaning of this phrase
– attempt to guess the context in which it was said

The prize if you win? One can of 100% barley malt beer – e.g. Ebisu, Suntory Malts, Asahi Premium.

Please do not post your answer in the comments. Send it to me via email or facebook. My email address is るぱんさんせい (romanized) at-mark gmail dot com.

One note: I realized I’ve been giving away beer at a phenomenal rate while exhausting all my cool little phrases, so the puzzle will now be every other week. You have two weeks to investigate this week’s phrase. 

I saw this sign twice in China. It reads: 向前一小歩　文明一大歩.

Literally, “direction forward one small step, civilization one big step.” Neil Armstrong was a big hint that you could put this into something like, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” 文明 means civilization, so you could plug that or something like “society” in for mankind.

The location was the best part of the sign. It was above the urinals in a men’s room, making that one small but literal step forward. Here’s a picture of the whole sign:

I think the translation provided on the sign is great. It avoids putzing around in the lingo and manages to be quick and crisp like the original.

Four people got the translation for this correct. Three got the location right but claimed to have seen it or heard of it before, so I drew randomly from all four. The winner this week is Bilbo…on the Fukushima JETs Forum. Congrats, Billy.

This is a short follow-up to last week’s puzzle answer. I explained that 〜ところです is used to describe what you are about to do, currently doing, or just did.

〜ところ is also a very useful way to begin telling a story to someone, except that when you tell someone a story it’s all in past tense, so instead of です, use でした.

So now we have:

食べるところでした。        I was just about to eat.
食べているところでした。    I was eating.
食べたところでした。        I had just finished eating.

Now, try and figure out this super-short story of mine:

手を洗っていたところでした。一年生がこっそりと歩いてきて、僕をカンチョウしちゃった！

I bet you can figure out the meaning on your own. As I was writing I realized that ところ is often followed by the particle で. So a more natural way to say the above is:

手を洗っていたところで、一年生が．．．

I’m not 100% sure, but I think that usage of で is very similar to usage in this sentence:

東京で会いました。

At that specific ところ was when/where the ichinensei crept up and poked you in the butt.

I vaguely remember that you can also use the particles へ and に with ところ, but I can’t remember any specific usages. Just keep that in mind.

Sorry for the Chinese diversion this week. I meant to have all this done and out of the way with by the time I returned, but the internets did not agree. The puzzle this week also comes from China. I saw a cool sign while I was there and I took a picture of it:

The puzzle this week is to provide me with two things: 1) a guess as to where the sign was located and 2) a translation that approximates the meaning. Bonus points for anyone who can incorporate communist fervor into their translation. Super bonus points for anyone who can combine that fervor with the legendary poetics of Neil Armstrong.

The prize if you win? One can of 100% barley malt beer – e.g. Ebisu, Suntory Malts, Asahi Premium.

Please do not post your answer in the comments. Send it to me via email or facebook. My email address is るぱんさんせい (romanized) at-mark gmail dot com.