Small thing, but ramen has a long vowel. ラーメン, らーめん
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Thanks! I wasn’t sure how to write it.
Should ramen be written in hiragana, katakana, or however anyone wants to write it?
You’ll see it both ways.
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Loving this thread 
the 危ない story got me laughing out loud.
My class was doing ~そう (looks like) a few weeks ago. I was supposed to form a sentence of this lawyer looking smart. Somehow instead of
弁護士は頭が良さそうです。
I ended up saying
弁護士は頭が弱そうです。
Oops.
And the person next to me made the mistake of saying 犬はかわいそうです。when she means it looks cute 
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Don’t worry, I’ve been there on that one too.
Whenever I talk to anyone in a natural situation, I get tongue tied. So I’ve said kowai instead of kawaii and yasai instead of yasui. I’ve said a lot of weird words and embarrassed the hell out of myself. But hey, my japanese isn’t as jouzu as they thought 
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One of my friends at the japanese centre tells a story of his response to some prejudiced comment where instead of saying “we are all people” he said “we are all carrots”
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It could almost work
皆んな人人でしょう。
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Trying to make an intelligent point to my Japanese teacher about development of eastern and western cores of civilization, but…instead of saying 西洋 (the west), I said 妖精 (fairy).
Edit: I also recently told the proprietor of a ryokan that I don’t eat 海賊 (pirates). She actually just took that in her stride.
About that first video, by the way: I’ve seen that pottery story on here so many times and, honestly, I hate it. I don’t know if I’m missing something because Koichi seems to absolutely love it. I always wonder what happened to the third group, though. You know, the ones who were told they’d be graded on quality, but were not arbitrarily restricted to making only one pot. The group who could make hundreds of pots to get a feel for how to do things, then could stop, reflect on what they’d done right and wrong, improve their process and design. What happened to them? As someone who has leech items I’ve seen over 100 times on here, I can attest to the fact that quantity does not always lead to quality.
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To be fair, many other words share the same pronunciation and pitch accent with fairy. So you could have been interpreted as saying larva or premature death!
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Haha. Yeah, I don’t remember the exact sentence I used, but I guess ‘fairy’ must have made the most sense of the options.
I also one tried to tell her something about steam engines, but used the word 湯気 which she was rather confused at since she said it mainly refers to the steam from food.
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I like the video because, in my opinion, it really communicates trying without being afraid of failing. As someone who is a perfectionist and has really bad mistake anxiety, it really helped me with my Japanese communication. Mostly because I know that if I don’t even try, I won’t be able to even make mistakes, let alone improve. That’s just the way I interpreted it though.
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I appreciate the point it’s making, and, yeah, I think you’re totally right in how you’ve interpreted it - absolutely people shouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes. However, I just don’t think that story’s a very good way of making the point. It’s a bit like that stupid “tea consent” video that was so popular last year: good point, terrible way of making it.
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Tea consent video?
Which is that?
Wow, it inspired me enough to make an entire thread. And I still remember it now. Guess I must have been really moved.
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Just Youtube “tea consent” (I won’t post it here, since it’s very off topic). I saw it on everyone and their dog’s facebook a few months back.
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Is there a standard response one is supposed to use to reply to that compliment? I always just kind of mutter, いいえ。。。
I am very much a beginner level student, but my husband and I had the wonderful opportunity to join a cultural tour to Japan with a group comprising native English speakers who teach Japanese language in Australian schools. It was not a typical tourist experience - we were honoured guests of many Japanese hosts in a variety of situations. My fellow Aussies waited until the whole two week tour was over before letting me know that every time a host had offered me more food or drink, I’d replied けっこん です instead of けっこう です。
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I think the most common response is a version of まだまだです。
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Are they told that? I watched the video the other day, but my impression was they only submitted one piece. They could do whatever they wanted but were only going to get one grade so in all likelihood they tried to make fewer things but weren’t required to make fewer things.
It also doesn’t really have anything to do with flashcard studying, so comparing it to WK performance doesn’t mean much.
The point is, if you see a Japanese person, you will learn more from trying to have a 10 minute conversation and making constant mistakes than if you spend 10 minutes trying to think of one grammatically perfect sentence to say.
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