I guess I’ll take this as a challenge and see how quickly I can translate things from Japanese into English, but I’ll just say that I personally don’t like translating texts when I can already understand them because I feel it’s not helpful for me. It’s better to think in the language you’re trying to learn once you’re able to do so and stick with that. That’s what I believe. So I’ll do it this time, but I probably won’t do it for other texts. (PS: if English isn’t your native language and you’re more comfortable with something else, there’s a chance that I speak some of it, so if you need to… I speak, in decreasing order of fluency, English, French, Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish)
Now then, time for that translation. Start time: 1:58
Chapter 10, 文化ノート (covered by a spoiler tag for the people who are using this thread but who haven’t read the text yet)
“Choujou”, “dandan”, “ookini”, “wariikkenee” are dialect words that express the same meaning, but what do you think that meaning is? In actual fact, these words all mean ‘thank you’.
Saying ‘amazingly delicious’ in the dialect of each region?
[Map]
Try reading each dialect word aloud. It’s interesting, isn’t it? In Japan, there are various dialects from region to region, just like this. The dialects are usually referred to with ‘region name + ben’, as in ‘Tohoku-ben’, ‘Nagoya-ben’, ‘Kyuushuu-ben’, and among them, Kansai-ben has become extremely common thanks to the media, with almost all Japanese people being able to understand it even if they don’t speak it. Everyone [of you] has heard of it somewhere too, right?
As opposed to dialects, the Japanese which newscasters speak, and which is used in things like textbooks and newspapers, is called Standard Japanese, and is a language that all Japanese people study at school. Long ago, Japanese was completely different in each of the regions, and even among Japanese people, smooth communication was impossible. Apparently, because of this, in the Meiji Era, Standard Japanese was created based on the language of Tokyo as a language that anyone would be able to speak and understand. Additionally, the word “namari” – to be distinguished from dialects – also exists. This refers to the unique accent and intonation of a region, and is not a difference in terms of language. Thus, it’s possible for Japanese people to speak Japanese-accented English.
Here’s a joke about dialects:
When a friend went to someone’s home in a certain region, she was told ‘You seem to have certain airs.’ She denied it, saying, ‘That’s not true,’ but she was repeatedly told, ‘You definitely have certain airs.’ Because she was told this no matter how much she denied it, she got quite a shock. However, she later found out that ‘having airs’ meant ‘you seem to be in poor condition and look sick’ and understood that it wasn’t that she was ‘putting on airs’, and she was apparently relieved.
End time: 2:24
Total time taken: 26 minutes
Note: the joke was not translated literally at all, but was instead translated so it might continue to make sense in English. ‘Airs’ was chosen both because it sounds somewhat like えらそう, and because it brings to mind the ‘aura’, which is believed by some people to exist and to indicate someone’s health. I was also perhaps thinking of the concept of 気, which ties into ‘airs’ quite nicely.
EDIT: accents → dialects in the last paragraph. I must have been sleepy when I typed that line.
