By far, my favorite of these interactions here in Japan has been with my first team leader. His English is not great, but it has been getting better with some encouragement. What is interesting is that he has developed a fondness for learning and practicing American slang, or common English one-liners.
Every day he tries using a new phrase he has found or heard. It's the delivery, more than anything that gets me. You hear the words you're used to hearing from back in America, but inflections and timing are out of sync. I love it. "Today I will leave at 5 sharp!" "After you." "That's disgusting!" "Once a slob, always a slob."

Not only did my friend buy and watch the movie last weekend, but he came to me the following Monday with each dialogue written in his notebook with the Japanese translations (see below). He of course, watched with Japanese sub-titles, but I was impressed that he picked up on the scenes I was telling him to look out for, and now he has a fresh set of one-liners for me.
I think I'll share that list with one of my co-workers.. He's working hard on his english, but has a heck of a time understanding "real" english.. He's been trying to watch Friends, and he gets lost..
ReplyDeleteAfter explaining the uses and meanings of "What the hell", the other day, I am ever so grateful that the language of international commerce happens to be my birth language.. So damn grateful...
However, I did learn to say "pervert" in a new way in japanese today, so I'm happy, even though I still haven't made it to "frog in a well" level of expressions..
I'm rather happy that the common japanese expression list is wayyyy smaller than the common english expression list..