I Want To Learn About The Internet Through Many Animals

Some of the best times I have in class is when students make little mistakes. I enjoy this mostly because I enjoy making mistakes.

There are moments when running flashcards gets a little monotonous. Usually I ask the kids what an English word means in Japanese (but not ‘hamburger’), they’ll tell me and I’ll try to pronounce it. Boy, do they get a kick out of that. I’ll even intentionally do it wrong, maybe say another word that sounds the same. Learning another language is not easy and I can only imagine what I sound like when I ask a grocery store employee if I’m buying the hard or soft tofu.

For instance, one word was ‘in’ and I said, “What does ‘in’ mean in Japanese?” “nani-nani no naka!” they said.

“Onaka?” I said and they busted out in laughter. Onaka means stomach.

My favorite mistake by a student was a simple noun switch, a mistake I certainly make when speaking the limited Japanese I know. I think that’s why I like it so much. The task was to take parceled out words that had been rearrange and put them into grammatical order. A student wrote his answer out as follows,

“I want to know about the internet through many animals.”

I have to say that I did laugh when I read this. Firstly because of the image and secondly I knew the student wouldn’t misconstrue my intention. I tried to explain to him what he wrote using hand gestures of computers, the desire to know, and getting to that knowledge through many animals. He didn’t see it. But that sentence has stuck with me.

There are smaller cases of miscommunication. Mostly on my part. Like this one:

One night Emma was making fish and chips and invited a bunch of us over.

“Could you grab ketchup* and some bread?” she asked me.

I said I would and wondered if she had vinegar and whether or not Balsamic was appropriate for fish and chips.

“I don’t but if you want some you can grab it. It’s su or o-su. They use it in sushi,” she said.

Afia and I went to the small grocery store near her house and quickly found the ketchup and the bread. The trouble was the vinegar. Though I had been armed with the pronunciation I was not well equipped for the spelling or written kanji. Afia and I scanned the middle aisle which was nothing but bottles of clear and yellow and brown liquids. Some showed pictures of salads, some depicted fish, some were just the painted calligraphy of kanji characters. There was one bottle, in both clear and brown, that showed sushi and had osusume (お勧め)　written below.

“This must be it,” I said to Afia. “It looks like vinegar, shows vinegar-esque food, and I see su here.” I bought the bottle, threw it in my obaasan-bike basket and rode it back to Emma’s.

“Did you get your vinegar?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, handing her the plastic bottle.

“David,” she said and laughed at me. “This is fish juice.”

“But the sign said o-su-something!”

“Did it say osusume?”

“Christ. Does that mean something other than vinegar?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It means ‘recommended’.”