yes, I can also inquire about the location of toilets
Wednesday, January 18th, 2006Two things I will remember how to say in Japanese until I die:
“It swelled up.”*
“Is there garlic in this?”**
Neither of these came up on my foreign language area studies fellowship application language skills evaluation today, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared.
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*I got my tongue pierced in Shinjuku in 2001. My conversational English students were universally appalled. One of them just stared at me for a long moment and then cried out, aghast, “But WHAT will your FATHER say?!”
**I have a sensitivity to garlic–by which I mean, it doesn’t make me swell up and die, but it kind of makes me wish that it had. I have heard all the jokes. I used to be able to WRITE “vampire” in Japanese, but not anymore.