my japanese class actually came a lot in handy today. pokemon card scalper was going to clear out a vending machine by me until we had a long conversation in japanese. ended with this dude giving me his phone number and offering to buy me cards when he’s in japan
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Language class joke:
Did you ask him if his cousins shirt was red on Tuesday?
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not yet but i can call him and ask
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I parsed “shit” as a slang term at first, like “you know I’m on that poop shit”
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Love the way this videos lyrics work
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こんにちは！ご不便をおかけしますが、私は日本語を話したり読んだりできません。英語しか話せません。このメッセージを書くためにGoogle翻訳を使用しました。日本語が話せない人と遊ぶのが面倒なのは理解できます。でも、もし私に面倒を見てもらえるなら、私は自分の仕事をうまくやれるように最善を尽くします。ご理解のほどよろしくお願いいたします。一緒に楽しい時間を過ごせるといいですね！
How did Google Translate do with this?
The original English input was:
Hello! Sorry for the inconvenience, but I can’t speak or read Japanese. I can only speak English. I used Google Translate to write this message. I understand that it’s troublesome to play with someone who can’t speak Japanese. But if you can take care of me, I will try my best to do my job well. Thank you for your understanding. I hope we can have a good time together!
I might be up to something dumb soon if I can get it working right he he
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what was your original english message? 面倒を見 might be a weird phrase to use depending on the context.
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I added it
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oh well then that’s a pretty literal translation! haha. it did a good job. good luck bud 
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The context is playing online co-operative multiplayer, for the record
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Massively and online if you catch my drift
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Also thank you for this but I regret to inform you that this game does not allow you to copy and paste text into the chat field lmao
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The samsung japanese keyboard only allows me to type hiragana.
Why.
My katakana is very bad, I need to practice.
This is a very, very silly thing.
Simply typing in the hiragana and the katakana popping up in the predictive text area is fairly helpful, but having the option to actually type in katakana would also be quite nice.
i might just download a new keyboard at some point but like, I don’t want to.
笑
This meme would also work well with ただいま and おかえり
Try caps lock—are you using a kana keyboard or romaji?
@FishHead happens with literally EVERYTHING in my experience lol. I don’t see 日本語上手 as passive aggressive or condescending like others seem to, but it’s funny how universal it is.
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Yeah I don’t see it as mean spirited either. That interpretation came probably mostly from japanese learning content creators memeing it to death. The times I encountered it, it was very obviously just a polite reaction from people raised in a very polite society.
My personal achievement is that my girlfriend hasn’t 日本語上手’d me yet. Except if I’d count her praising my language skills in front of my parents (in German) but that would be at best a third degree 日本語上手 and I can live with that.
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So if you just have a five second interaction with an employee at a convenience store will they say it?
I remember on the podcast a fairly long time ago Tim was saying how no one in China ever comments on one’s Chinese ability. At the time I thought that was completely wrong, since people certainly acknowledge I am a foreigner speaking in Chinese all the time. But then I started to wonder if I just feel that way because I’ve never spent time in Japan.
E.g. I don’t think anyone’s ever praised my Chinese in, like, a customer service situation – especially not in the automatic way that I think is being implied when people talk about 日本語上手. It’s very rarely the first thing someone says to me, though sometimes they’ll say it after conversing for a while. Taxi drivers and bored waiters will often begin conversations by asking how long I’ve been in China or how long I’ve been studying Chinese, which I kind of lumped together with faint-praise of language ability all in some broad category of “acknowledging my foreignness”, but I guess they’re actually very different things.
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