Nihongo ga Jozu! You speak Japanese very well!
You've been in Japan too long when you get a nihongo ga jozu ("you speak Japanese very well") and feel mildly insulted. This happened to me the other day: I was at one of the onsen hot springs around my house -- amazingly, there are three of them within a 5 km radius of J-List -- talking with the lady at the counter, when one of the other employees came up and praised my Japanese skills. It's an odd fact of life in Japan, but foreigners who are learning the language strive for that magic moment when Japanese people will finally stop telling them how good their Japanese is and just talk to them normally. After four years of study at SDSU and almost eighteen years living here, I am hopefully as bilingual as I'll ever need to be. Unless I venture outside my core areas of experience, like visiting a history museum or trying to engage my son in detailed discussions of Chiinese history and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I can get by pretty well.
My goal was to study enough that people stopped praising my Japanese abilities. Right, Patty?
posted by Peter in Japan at 8:06 PM
7 Comments:
hahaha whenever I get the nihongo ojouzu desune in the US I just quietly laugh to myself. I guess I get amused when they say it even tho its technically an insult. In reality my nihongo is very heta so when they say jouzu it makes it the more ironic :P
1:14 AM
Now, what I want to know is, after 18 years of immersion in Japanese, how much English have you lost, if any?
2:20 AM
A little off topic, I'm an ROTK fan myself. Did you realize what Lu Bu did before he became the greatest warrior in all of China? He was a magistrate...
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=32
12:20 PM
Hinano, they really are just trying to be kind, and they're of course surprised to see anyone speak Japanese outside of their home country. So don't take it personally.
Tim, I remember a patch when we had no other foreigners at J-List for like 2 years. So I spoke Japanese all day, then typed emails in English, but didn't actually speak English at all. It was a little weird. I've also had patches where I thought the ESL-ish English of my students was affecting me.
Lord, wish I could get into ROTK, although it looks beautiful. Red Cliff was great to watch.
12:03 AM
The "you've been Japan too long" lines were always like motivaters to me, in my early years of Japanophilia. I use to say, "I can't wait until the day I'm able to make them on a whim". I remember reading that specific one like a decade ago. Hey, Peter, when was the first time, during your Japanese study, that you watched anime or Jdorama and understood almost 100% of what you heard?
8:12 AM
I used to re-watch Totoro every year to gague my Japanese ability. I am pretty much at 100% now for that. For some reason, the original Macross movie is still quite difficult -- I have a theory that the movie imprinted itself on my brain back when I knew nothing, and that imprinting blocks me from understanding part fo it easily.
Ah, the baka old days when I thought the Zentraedi language was Japanese, and was trying to understand it...
9:55 AM
18 years!! WOW!! I lasted 10 and could never go back. I love the country, people food etc. But trying to live in Japan as a regular Joe is impossible. To most Japanese they think you have just walked of the plane.
Still, just take it as a compliment.
http://speakjapanesefluently.com/
8:55 PM
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