I mix up my kun’oyomi and on’yomi pronunciations. When my Japanese teacher asks if we know a word, I blurt it out, only to feel intense shame when she shakes her head no. (She isn’t shaming me; I just feel that way.)
When I took class, our teacher used to burst out laughing when we practiced katakana words like “ナイフ” and “東京ディズニーランド.” I guess hearing native English speakers say things all slow and weird is strange.
Another time, a guy practicing a dialogue accidentally said 駅の前に愛しましょう instead of 駅の前に会いましょう. The teacher managed not to laugh until I did, and then she couldn’t hold it in. He was very embarrassed.
One of my most memorable moments in studying Japanese was when we were working on ている in class, and doing an activity where the teacher would hold up a picture and we had to say something about it using that grammar point.
@crihak
Thank you for sharing that video. It’s one of my favorite ones to refer to!
As for mistakes in social situations, I will never forget one of the first conversations I had in Japanese. The person I was talking to asked me if I bought bananas often and I wanted to say “Yes, I do. They are cheap” I said 「はい、バナナは野菜です~ 」
yeah never made that mistake again. I was sooooo embarrassed.
Even today in class, one of my ninth graders was writing for a presentation and she wrote
“drown” instead of “drawn.” I explained to her that spelling is really important in these situations because you can write 気持ち悪い単語. And we looked up drown in the dictionary together and had a laugh, which is the important part of this story. It’s important to be able to laugh at yourself and you’ll definitely remember what mistake you made because of the experience you had. I don’t think she’ll ever forget the difference between Drawn and Drown now.
This happened on HelloTalk last week. A guy said he liked drowning pictures. I made sure to correct that for him.
I’m sure we’ll all have our super embarassing time at some point.
So when I was learning Korean there was a word for fish romanized as “saengson” and a word for teacher romanized as “sonsaengnim” (nim is an honorific). It’s pretty hard to mix up especially when looking at hangul, but my teacher specifically told the class not to mix them… which promptly confused me for the rest of the semester. On the bright side, I ended up being really polite to fish for a while.
me too, and knowing that I do it, I always stop and overthink whenever I’m wanting to use either of them…
It’s backwards from the English!
つくる has an う sound in the middle but it means make
つかう has an あ sound in the middle but it means use
When I was learning I sometimes used the WK mnemonic. つく = too cool. You made something too cool, it must be destroyed!
Most often I think of the core6k example sentence that’s forever etched into my brain: このパソコンを使ってください。
That’s one big benefit of listening to sample sentences I feel… on repetition it etches these words into your brain along with the appropriate context.
Alternative translation: I will go to Japan and eat ramen with John. I actually wanted to say ジョンと日本に行ってらめんを食べます (with John I go to Japan and eat ramen), but my Japanese teacher complained and said I should put the things in order of importance: I go to Japan with John and eat ramen.