(This picture has nothing to do with the content. It's a picture of ginger ale, and I put it here because it made from ginger (well, at least its name contains the word "ginger") and I started to drink it here in Japan, specially on party because I don't drink alcohol. Anyway, if you ever play Japanese RPG, you will find it there, and it can restore your hit point or increase your strength during battle - depends on the RPG - this also has nothing to do with the content... :-) )
Picture upload by Hello
Before you actually packing ginger in your bag for your trip to Japan, you better read this first.
I’m keeping one series of riddle about how to put an elephant in a freezer, and it usually works well on a casual talk with new friends, regardless their nationality (i.e. they will laugh on it and keep on asking for the next riddle). I almost think that it is a universal riddle, when I finally found that most of my Japanese friend didn’t laugh much when they heard the riddle. (Well, may be it is because my Japanese still wasn’t good enough when I asked that question :-) ). Anyway, although that riddle doesn’t do the trick, I later found out that wordplay works well on most of my Japanese friends. And lucky me, there are a lot of homophone in Japanese words (the slight difference only on the intonation), that make it easy to do wordplay with them. For example the word hashi can mean both chopstick (箸) and bridge (橋), where ame can mean both rain (雨) and sweets (飴). (The intonations for both words are usually different for each region in Japan. For example, the intonation of hashi that suppose to mean 'bridge' in kansai (関西 - area in Japan where Osaka is located) would mean 'chopstick' in kantou (関東 - area in Japan where Tokyo is located)). And while it is usually hard to intentionally start a joke with those two words, there are other words that can be very useful for icebreaker.
Here are several wordplays that I have found work with my friends here:
しょうがない(shouganai)
The phrase above is equivalent with “there’s nothing else that we can do” in English. It is said when you get trapped into a situation that forced you to do something that you actually don’t want to do. Since shouga (生姜) can also mean ginger, the phrase above can be loosely translated into “there’s no ginger”/”we’re running out of ginger”. And the question now is: what can you do when you running out of ginger? Of course you can just buy ginger! So, when somebody tells you "しょうがない" (there’s nothing else that we can do), you can simply said "生姜買えばいいじゃん？"(Shouga kaeba ii jan? - We can just buy ginger, can’t we?)
("しょうがない" is actually a colloquial phrase. The grammatically correct sentence is "しようがない"(shiyouganai). That ginger trick won’t work on this, however, since shiyou (しよう) sounds a lot like shio (しお - 塩) which means salt, your response can be easily modified into "塩を買えばいいじゃん？"(Shio wo kaeba ii jan? - We can just buy salt, can’t we?)
憑かれる(tsukareru)
This will work when you use email (because the trick is on the kanji). When your friends ask you to go to party together and you are too tired to go, you can simply said that you are tired now (今ちょっと疲れているけど。。。- ima chotto tsukareteiru kedo...). There’s nothing wrong with the answer, however, if you switch the kanji into "今ちょっと憑かれているけど。。。"(both the kanji have the same pronunciation), it won't tell your friends that you are tired. Instead, it will tell them that you are being possessed (by ghost). If your friends have a good sense of humor, they will only laugh on it, however, if they are a serious type of person, I think they will pay you a visit soon with some psychics experienced to do exorcism.
睡眠(suimin)
You can use this for your self-introduction (自己紹介 - jiko shoukai). When you need to mention your hobby, you can just say that your hobby is suimin (私の趣味はすいみんです - watashi no shumi wa suimin desu). While it sounds a lot like swimming (Japanese sometimes using English words in daily conversation), it's actually translated into: My hobby is sleeping.
Caution: Please check whether your friends have some sense of humor or not before using them. There are times when - no matter how hard you try - they just doesn’t work, and you don’t need to push it. Just get back, relax, and try to find some other jokes... :-)
Post Comment
Post a Comment