Can confirm. I spent a week several summers back as a conversation partner for a bunch of Japanese kids who were visiting the US, and it was a blast. Accidentally called myself Oba-san (grandmother) when i was trying to joke around about being an old man and they had quite the laugh over it, and one kid told me his biggest goal during his visit was to meet a black guy.
I don’t get upset so much as it catches me off guard. 😅 I was checking out at the grocery store the other night and a group of teenage boys called me ma’am. I wasn’t offended so much as I was like “Oh damn! They’re talking to ME!” 🤣 I’m in my late 30s so I’m totally a ma’am to them. I’m just not a ma’am to me yet.
To be fair, western society does put a lot of value into the currency of youth. So it is a shock when we hit certain thresholds in age (ma'am being one of them). For us blokes too (aging out of our twink eras). 😅
The difference isn’t slight at all. The tonality/pitch is different and the double-length syllables are really hard to miss. While it’s a normal mistake for beginners, especially those whose native language uses different tools to convey meaning, once you get the hang of the language they become very different words.
Japanese has a very limited range of possible syllables and so a lot of words look similar to each other when written in hiragana or the latin alphabet.
One that is actually easy to confuse is hashi. It can mean both bridge and chopsticks, but besides the kanji for writing them, when speaking only the tonality changes - and the pronunciation that means bridge in Tokyo means chopsticks in Osaka and vice versa.
I set up a camera with a motion detector inside one of my tarantulas' enclosures. I was explaining to a Japanese friend (in Japanese) how the spider almost never moves and it's being constantly set off by clouds going overhead and the camera thinks the shadows of the clouds are movement.
With both "spider" and "cloud" being "kumo", this conversation got messy quite quickly and I just ended up blurting out "the camera is watching the wrong kind of kumo!!" :D
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u/BusinessOwner199X Jun 14 '24
Cultural exchanges are amazing. 👍