Your Funny Japanese Mistakes

I’m sorry to all the mods… it might be inappropriate to mention this to your friend, but… not enough hentai?

I have two, one of which is second hand.

I’ve been a martial artist for several decades and last year I hosted our organization’s head sensei and his wife in my house. I frantically mixed in several hospitality-related phrases to my then-still-very-new Japanese learning. Overall, I did reasonably well… except I very nearly made one embarrassing mistake, due to learning two similar words at almost the exact same time.

What I meant to say: (their names)は私のお客さんです [(names)ha watashi-no okyaku-san desu - “You are my guests”]
What I almost said (blessedly caught myself just before the words left my mouth): (their names)は私の奥さんです [(names)ha watashi-no oku-san desu - “You are my wives”].

I later told his wife what I almost said and she darn near killed herself laughing.

However, top honours for the funniest Japanese screw-up I’ve ever heard of goes to a friend of mine who went over to Japan and got pulled over by the cops for speeding. His Japanese was extremely poor, so he was frantically trying to explain to the cop that he couldn’t speak Japanese very well. I… don’t even know what he was trying to say (“私は日本語が話しません”, maybe?), but what actually came out was “私は日本人を食べません” (watashi-ha nihonjin-o tabemasen - “I don’t eat Japanese people”).

Apparently the cop was laughing too hard to give him a ticket.

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Someone I know wanted to said japanese is hard (日本語は難し)but he said 日本語は紫

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I work in an Elementary school in America and a Japanese student had just transferred there, so trying to be the “cool” teacher I asked him “英語を話しますか?” And he looked at me weird. Turns out I actually said “映画を話しますか?”
So, do you speak movie??

はずかしかった…

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Hahaha
Maybe you wanted to discuss some of the new movies in theatre :face_with_monocle:

just recently, i made a really embarrassing mistake while translating something. instead of 選択 (choices) i wrote 洗濯 (laundry)… the line ended up being “a world of infinite laundry”, as no one has let me forget.

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A new funny mistake just appeared!

I wrote
銀座を買いました〜
and my significant asked
ぎょうざ?
and I was like
いいえ、東京の銀座丁目を買いました oO

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I can’t make puns, but I saw this one on ねこねこ日本史 regarding the 川中島の戦い

I don’t know how to compress images so I’ll post them separately, sorry!


It’s not that funny, but I never had trouble reading 部屋 until wanikani introduced me to 部室. I now keep reading 部屋 as ぶや. Booyah. :expressionless:

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So I went to Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market last month and I was shopping with my family in one shop:

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Why did they respond with “御座?”

Having trouble following this one.

This one was hella stupid. I was translating a manga that is not historical, but at some point mentioned the word 女王 . I thought it was 女生, read it as じょせい and so translated it to “woman”, because of the word 女性. The line of thought barely makes sense… Well… at least queens are females.
The most embarrassing part is that it wasn’t only 女王, but 女王様. What a “josei-sama” would even be? I thought it meant a dominatrix or femme fatale.

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Actually that’s just a typo and what the IME made out of it
He meant 餃子 but the う was missing and ぎょざ gets converted into 御座

I removed the typo from the original post because it isn’t relevant

I work in an office in Japan. The other day I had to ask my coworker if I could borrow the vacuum cleaner (掃除機そうじき)but I asked if I could borrow a funeral instead.(葬式そうしき)

There was minor confusion lol.

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I make many mistakes often. Of course, there is the classic the Banana is a vegetable instead of the banana is cheap.

But lately, with a friend, I was retelling something that happened and I had wanted to say that the person had apologized. And so instead of 謝って(あやまって)…あやめる (殺める・危める)uuuuhm oops. :cold_sweat:

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Probably a few too many in-jokes in this one.

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The 病院 joke is very timely. I just learned 美容院 a few days ago and I was thinking how they could sound similar in fast speech.