Nihonjin no shiranai nihongo

[charmian]

torachan posted about this awhile back. This manga is a bunch of shorts about the trials of being a teacher of Japanese to foreigners, who sometimes ask questions native speakers don't know how to answer. Most of the manga won't make sense to people who don't know Japanese, as it is er... about the Japanese language.


Many of the students work part time in the restaurant industry, so sometimes they ask insanely difficult questions about stuff like "so what is the square dish where the shoyu goes called?"

A ladle is known as "o-tama" because it resembles in shape a tadpole.

The spoon that goes in ramen is called a "renge."

The counters in Chinese and Japanese are different. In Japan, animate and inanimate things are fairly strictly divided, but in China, a snake and a river have the same counter.

LOL at the part with the aristocratic French lady who learned her Japanese from her interest in yakuza movies. XD Actually this was pretty interesting, and explained several words I had found puzzling. A lot of them come from hanafuda terms (used in gambling). Shikato means to ignore or turn your back on someone. This comes from the deer card in hanafuda which is worth ten points, thus the name (shika+to). The deer is looking away, so it means, I suppose, don't make like the 10 pt deer.

Some of the students are quite diligent and learn keigo better than some Japanese people. The teacher notes that many Japanese shop workers and waiters use keigo improperly.

Another cultural difference is the difference between batsu and maru. In Japan, maru (circle) means "correct," yet Americans may interpret this as a zero.

Also, there are tons of old hiragana which were dropped from official usage during standardization, as well as hiragana for entire words. Damn, this must make reading old documents difficult!

Often the kanji for fish are not the same fish as they were in China. 鮪 is tuna in Japanese, but in Chinese, it means sturgeon. 鮭 is salmon in Japanese, but fugu in Chinese!

Speaking of salmon, shockingly, ikura is actually a Russian word!

Comments

[torachan]

It's a really fun read, isn't it? I love that there's manga of stuff like this.

[charmian]

Yeah! Let me know if you find more like this. XD

[myaru]

Interesting, this makes me want to pick it up. But I just gave money to Kinokuniya, argh. Of course, review probably trumps all right now.

The maru thing always seemed pretty clear to me, especially because it's always a circle in print. I guess it could get confusing hand-written, but? I don't know. Context is everything.

[charmian]

It's pretty entertaining, though a short read indeed.

Well, if you don't read print, though, and you get exposed through the marks of the instructor on your worksheets? I can see the confusion there.

[lennan]

That sounds pretty neat and informative. I really like the idea of stuff like this out there.

[(Anonymous)]

I met the 2 mangaka today. At the moment they're traveling to various countries to speak with college students who study Japanese. They explained how they came up with the idea and told us it's quite a new genre of manga they're trying out.. even in Tokyo. I haven't read it yet, but it looks interesting.