Category Archives: random

The “No Boku” Challenge!

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I’ve wanted to do this for a while now. Starting today, I will attempt to go for as long as possible speaking Japanese without using a personal pronoun to refer to myself! No 私, no 僕, no 俺, no 自分, and definitely no あたし or おいら. I might make an exception for 家. Nah, none of that either.

I’ll call it the “No Boku” Challenge because boku is my current personal pronoun of choice, and it sounds better than the “No Personal Pronoun” Challenge. Feel free to join in and see how long you can hold out!

I think the three keys to this challenge will be:

1) constant vigilance

2) passive tense

3) giving and receiving verbs

I think this will be a great exercise, especially for students of the language in the intermediate / advanced-intermediate levels; that’s when you start to break free from the English grammar patterns that bar you from true Japanese phraseology.

I’ll do my best to log my progress. Boku will soon be my pink elephant, so I’m sure there will be many harrowing and hilarious tales of near self-referral. Ha ha. (Joke.)

笑われていいとも！

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One of the elementary schools I taught at for three years was deep in the mountains. Every Thursday I’d drive the beat-up red town car from the junior high school west along the river and then turn right, head into the mountains. The school only had about 30 kids total from 1st to 6th grade, so I taught sets of two grade years: 1st and 2nd, 3rd and 4th, 5th and 6th.

I thought it would be difficult at first, and it was a little when the kids rose a year and got matched with a different set of students, but the older kids always helped the younger ones along. I found that I could get the older kids to provide examples of different patterns and games.

Once I was teaching the 5th and 6th graders vowels. In Japanese the word for vowel is 母音 (ぼいん). [On an interesting side note, the word for consonant is 子音 (しいん)]. 母音 has an unusual pronunciation, so I wrote it on the board for the kids, but for some reason when I said it, the kids started laughing hysterically. I said it again, and they laughed even harder! One kid added, ダニエル先生、すごい！ At one point the assistant principal, who was overseeing the class, had to tell kids to stop laughing. I still had no idea what was so funny. I could tell something I said was strange, but I just moved on with the lesson.

A couple weeks later I was teaching the same material to 3rd and 4th graders, and 母音 elicited the same response. This time, however, one of the little boys mimed a giant set of breasts. Ah ha! I thought, ボイン is the noise that boobs make when they move up and down! No wonder they were laughing so much. I had been standing up in front of the class saying, "Okay, guys, there are two types of boobs – long boobs and short boobs, and they make different sounds for each letter."

Laughter is an amazing warning sign. I love it when people laugh at my Japanese. It lets me know that my joke has worked or that I’ve said something incredibly incorrect and strange. Either way, it’s an easy way for people to reinforce better speaking without having to say, “Hey asshole, you messed up.”

If I get laughed at for a mistake, I don’t usually make that mistake again. On the internship I wrote about previously, I once brought omiyage for the group, announcing them by saying このお土産を京都から連れてきました。They all laughed, and the division head let me know that 連れる is only used for people; basically, I had just said, “I have accompanied this omiyage from Kyoto. Please enjoy.” 持ってきた is the correct pattern. Needless to say, I haven’t made that mistake again.

The point? Try not to take it personally if someone laughs at your Japanese, and feel free to laugh at strange English. You’re doing them a favor.

This isn’t really a puzzle, but I will beer the first person to explain the pun from and relevance of the title.

(I also wrote about laughter when I nearly killed a tanuki.)

Great Moments in Film Translation – Pulp Fiction

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There’s the most famous line from the movie rendered into Japanese subtitles – “I’m going to make dinner of your backside.” Even a generous untranslation only gets “I’m gonna roast your ass.” Although perhaps “料理ing an 後ろ” is as unusual a wording in Japanese as “getting medieval” is in English which I guess is the one of the highlights of Tarantino movies – dialogue that’s close enough to vernacular English to seem real but at the same time funny and edgy enough to be cool and therefore hyperreal.

The dubbing goes in a different direction and is possibly more accurate: (the best I could tell it is,) けつぶけで破って、グチャグチャしてやる。Man, a little help from the audience. Any idea what a けつぶけ is? I get the けつ part, and I get the やぶる part. I also understand that this is what probably results in グチャグチャ of the, I’m assuming, asshole region.

号外 – Mr. Shorty Shorts

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Saturday night the booze flowed, and the muse was speaking to me; I thought up an awesome Japanese name for people, such as one of my roommates, who continue to wear shorts into the winter months: 短パンマン.

アンパンマン is a legendary Japanese cartoon character named after a dessert bread stuffed with azuki bean paste.

Actual アンパン:

Actual アンパンマン:

The azuki bean bread (アンパン) easily transforms to shorts (短パン), making a great pun. It received high praise from the other roommates.

You heard it here first. (In the words of John Henson, former host of Talk Soup, "Come on, it’s funny!")

Cool Compound – 連休

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Japan, much like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has many long weekends programmed into its calendar, allowing stress to subside and giving everyone a chance to do traveling, relaxing, or additional boozing that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. This upcoming Monday is Culture Day (see Japan Navigator for further details), so there will be no post here. I’ve taken off the last few Monday holidays, so I thought I’d just let you know that I’m not mailing them in – they are actual holidays. And everyone knows I only mail-in the Friday posts.

The word for long vacation in Japanese is easy to remember – 連休 (れんきゅう) means “consecutive holiday/break.” It is most commonly used by itself or with a 3 in front of it – 三連休 (さんれんきゅう) – but I do remember that morning news announcers get excited when the stars align and Golden Week delivers a 4 or 5-day 連休.

Enjoy your day off.

Cool Link – Fssshhhh!

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That subject line is the punch line to the joke, "What do you call a fish with with no eyes?"

Ad Blankestijn (still embarassingly unsure how to pronounce that name) has started a Fish O’ Japan Almanac beginning with aji. Really interesting stuff, and HOLY SHIT am I excited to eat some anko (Blackmouth Angler) this winter. I had no idea those things were edible. The only thing he could do better would be to provide the kanji, although to be honest you don’t have to write the kanji when you order at a sushi restaurant, and often fish names are written in katakana because fish kanji are so obscure, so if you want to bone up on your fish vocab, head over to Japan Navigator.