KID ETHNIC IS WRITTEN BY:
saleem
who is currently moving around East Asia.
kidethnic@gmail.com
ALSO BY KID ETHNIC:
The Annual Kid Ethnic Valentine
Because I love you so much.
The Alpaca Song
I wrote and recorded this for you. Because you <em>need</em> a song about alpacas, don’t you?
100JapaneseThings
A collaborative site to help folks (and each other) find Japanese stuff.
The Whiteboard Videos
Music+Whiteboard Markers+Friends=Good ways to spend weekends
SEAWEED BREAKFAST
A weekly column about Japan that I wrote for Glimpse.org.
Twitter
I twitter infrequently. But hope we can stay friends.
From Flesh and Bone to Wooden Death: Wee Sounds of Confusion · 5 November 07
True story, 1:
The students awaited the next question.
I pointed to my knee. ‘What’s this?’ I asked.
‘Log,’ said the first.
‘Kill,’ said the second.
They were not joking, and they were not stupid (explanation below).
True Story, 2:
A friend of mine is leaving his school office. He wishes to say, ‘Shitsurei-shimasu’.
Instead he bows deeply and announces, ‘Shamisen.’
—-
If you don’t speak Japanese, Story 2’s not that amusing. Both words start with ‘Sh’ and have ‘m’s in the middle, an easy mistake to make, right?
Slightly more amusing if you know the meaning, in which case it reads like this:
A friend of mine is leaving his school office. He wishes to say, ‘I’m excusing myself, see you later’.
Instead he bows deeply and announces, ‘Three-string Japanese classical banjo.’
Now, when I tell my Japanese friends the second story, they laugh like crazy. When I tell my Japanese friends the FIRST, and, to me, funnier story, they find it only mildly amusing. Nobody busts out laughing.
To them, the friend in Story 2 is making a hilariously absurd mistake.
The students in Story 1 are merely making minor errors:
‘Log’: The lady thought I was trying to get them to say “leg”, obviously. She just got a vowel wrong.
‘Kill’ and ‘Knee’ both start with ‘K’, the student just blurted out the wrong ‘K’ word.
And when I think of it that way, they’re right, of course.
—-
FROM WHICH WE MIGHT CONCLUDE:
1) What seems like a minor pronunciation error to a non-native speaker can be a comical and huge distinction to a native-speaker. In any language.
2) Writing subtitles for pun-filled foreign comedies must be dang near impossible.
* * *
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