# Help Requested from Japanese Speakers **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 29, 2003, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187 "2003-05-29T04:05:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Netbrian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/71e660/32.png) [@Netbrian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Netbrian)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/1 "2003-05-29T04:05:15Z")
Hello! I am a student at Willamette University majoring in Japanese. Unfortunately, I’ve only taken a year, and thus my skill is generally not very high. When speaking with a Japanese pen pal of mine (we use both English and Japanese), my correspondent seriously overestimateed my fluency, and sent the following message. Through use of a dictionary and just plain guesswork, I’ve very roughly decoded it, but would very much appreciate help from those more knowledgable in the language. Nihonde haoto kono hitoha “watasi” nokawarini “ore” “boku” wotukaimasu. Brianha, ninongo umaine. konna funi, mata nihongode okutute hosiina. hitotudakeiuto [honwo,yomunoga] toiimasu. demototemojiyouzu!!! Note that the spacing is mostly guesswork, and was not included in her message. I would have left it out entirely, save for that it would wreak havoc with the line spacing. Thank you so much! ---
**Author:** ![MelCthefirst](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/eada6e/32.png) [@MelCthefirst](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MelCthefirst)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/2 "2003-05-29T04:17:32Z")
she said: when you talk about yourself (I), you can use ‘watashi’ or ‘ore’ or ‘boku’. Brian is good at Japanese. I’d like us to continue to write letters to each other like this in Japanese. You say ‘hon wa yomuno ga’ (not hitotudakeiuto?) but you are good (at Japanese) ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/3 "2003-05-29T05:16:08Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Netbrian \* > \*\*Nihonde haoto kono hitoha “watasi” nokawarini “ore” “boku” wotukaimasu. Brianha, ninongo umaine. konna funi, mata nihongode okutute hosiina. > > hitotudakeiuto [honwo,yomunoga] toiimasu. demototemojiyouzu!!! > \*\* Note: _Nihonde haoto kono hitoha_ should be: _Nihon de ha otoko no hito ha_. I had to read that several time for it to make sense. Also, _okutute_ is almost certainly _okutte_. So here goes: > [@](#): > > In Japan, men use “ore” or “boku” instead of “watashi”. Brian, your Japanese is pretty good. I’d like to write to me (like that) in Japanese again. > > One nitpick, though: we say: “hon wo yomunoga”. However, you’re very good!!! ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/4 "2003-05-29T05:19:22Z")
Arrgh! “I’d like to write to me” should be: “I’d like **you** to write to me” Also, “several time **s** ”. ---
**Author:** ![Netbrian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/71e660/32.png) [@Netbrian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Netbrian)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 5:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/5 "2003-05-29T05:28:44Z")
Thank you so much for your guys’ help. It actually helps me a great deal with these are written in kana/kanji as opposed to romanji, as it makes the spacing issues easier. Until we get encoding working properly though, I’m stuck with romanji. Thank you again! ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 5:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/6 "2003-05-29T05:59:02Z")
Men in Japanese do also use ‘watashi’ for 1st Person Singular. Just like everything else in the language, though, the choice of ‘watashi’ or ‘boku’ etc. depends on social setting and standing. ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 6:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/7 "2003-05-29T06:10:08Z")
Yes, that’s true, but the over-use of “watashi” is one of the staples of “gaijin-speak”. Which, when corrected, is obviously replaced by over-use of “boku”. The rule is simple though: use “boku” with friends, and “watashi” in formal settings. Never use “watakushi” unless you’re in a job interview or giving a speech. “Ore” is only for very informal settings and many men don’t use it at all. Personal pronouns in Japanese are a lot like clothes, you have to pick the right ones for the right occasions. ---
**Author:** ![Netbrian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/71e660/32.png) [@Netbrian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Netbrian)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 6:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/8 "2003-05-29T06:33:54Z")
**jovan** , thank you for the information regarding “watashi” and “boku”. In my class, we used almost exclusively “watashi”, likely due to the classroom setting (and to eliminate gender difficulties, which, since the class had two females to eighteen males, wasn’t really an issue), so it is really what I’m most used to. I’ll keep that in mind when writing these letters and in class! ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 8:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/9 "2003-05-29T08:18:04Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Netbrian \* > **It actually helps me a great deal with these are written in kana/kanji as opposed to romanji, as it makes the spacing issues easier. Until we get encoding working properly though, I’m stuck with romanji.** Just sign up for a free [Yahoo! Japan Mail](http://mail.yahoo.co.jp/) account. Setting up your browser to display Japanese should be easy on most operating systems. Certainly easier than setting up a non-web based e-mail program to work with Japanese or installing a Japanese input system. By the way, Yahoo! Japan is a completely separate system from the American Yahoo! system. User IDs and passwords aren’t shared between the two, so you’ll need to get new ones even if you already have a Yahoo! account. I think MSN mail (Hotmail) works differently - a shared account that can be set up to display Japanese messages. That might be easier if you already have an account there. ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 9:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/10 "2003-05-29T09:25:44Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by scr4 \* > \*\*Just sign up for a free [Yahoo! Japan Mail](http://mail.yahoo.co.jp/) account. Setting up your browser to display Japanese should be easy on most operating systems. Certainly easier than setting up a non-web based e-mail program to work with Japanese or installing a Japanese input system. > \*\* Actually, if you’re using MS Outlook, you can easily read and write e-mail in Japanese, it’s just a matter of installing the Japanese IME, which you can download from Microsoft. This will also allow you to type Japanese into Word, which is great. However, I’m not sure if **Netbrian** was talking about displaying Japanese characters on the SDMB… ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 11:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/11 "2003-05-29T11:39:34Z")
Netbrian: It’s not “gender difficulty” as the word ‘watashi’ is used by males. The real issue is that many ‘gaikokujin’ (IME) overuse pronouns in Japanese. Remember that Janese is a “pro-drop” language. ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 12:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/12 "2003-05-29T12:34:48Z")
If you’ll allow a slight hijack, the problem is that many grammaticians and textbook writers adopt an overly Euro-centric paradigm when addressing Japanese structure, which leads to stylistic abberations like “watashi ha ringo wo tabemasu” for “I eat an apple”. Japanese sentences do not _need_ a subject, nor a theme. (Note here that I refer to “subject” as words followed by _ga_, while a theme precedes the _ha (wa)_ particle. And now to somewhat steer back to the op, note that your penpal wrote: _Brian ha, ninongo umai ne._ Which **MelCthefirst** translated as: \*Brian is good at Japanese. \* This is of course _litterally_ correct, but it’s interesting in that it’s a sentence typical of the way many (young) girls speak: they’ll replace _all_ personnal pronouns with the person’s name. (Though young men do it often for the second person and it’s common usage to do so for the third person, _kare_ and _kanojo_ aren’t used very often.) Several years ago, when I asked my then-girlfriend to help me write a letter she said: _Ja, jovan ga kaite kara, Ami ga naoshite ageru wa!_ Which comes out as: _Okay, after jovan’s done writing it, Ami’ll correct it for him!_ But she meant: _Okay, after you’re done writing it, I’ll correct it for you!_ … Did I just loose everyone? ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/13 "2003-05-29T14:48:06Z")
Nope, you got us all tight. Honestly, one of the things I like about the language is that it is kind of fast & loose with the “requirement” for a subject, especially pronominal subjects. I found that it made me actually pay attention to the conversation more. Well, having the main verb at the end of the sentence forced me to pay attention too! ---
**Author:** ![Cerowyn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/82dd89/32.png) [@Cerowyn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cerowyn)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 3:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/14 "2003-05-29T15:03:13Z")
My company has a natural language processing system that interprets Japanese, so the “fast & loose” aspect of conversational Japanese is a nightmare. However, I have to admit that I admire the brevity when I’m trying to get by in the language myself. The “simple” version of phrases that I’m learning turn out to be fairly conventional for casual conversation. ---
**Author:** ![MelCthefirst](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/eada6e/32.png) [@MelCthefirst](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MelCthefirst)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/15 "2003-05-29T20:52:08Z")
My ‘method’ is to translate Japanese as a mostly direct translation for Japanese language learners. I think they learn more this way because then it is up to them to translate into natural English. But I learned Japanese through language immersion, so I don’t know if it’s different for more formal language learners. Also, the Japanese men where I lived used to say ‘ore’ with much more frequency than ‘boku’ - and it was also trendy to for girls to refer to themselves as ‘boku’ but I don’t know if this is still the case. ---
**Author:** ![Netbrian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/71e660/32.png) [@Netbrian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Netbrian)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2003, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/16 "2003-05-30T02:11:16Z")
**jovan** , about how young of girls do that? My pen pal does that, and she’s eighteen (I wanted people reasonably close to my own age, for various reasons.) **Monty** , yes, I’m working very hard at eliminating my overuse of pronouns. It’s such a hard habit to get out of for an English speaker, but I’m doing my absolute best. Also, I use AOL’s webmail to communicate, and we actually did get Japanese characters to work properly (to a point, at least). Several months ago, I attempted to install the Japanese IME for my computer, but it never worked properly. Right now, I’m stuck using a Japanese word processor (JWPce), and copy/pasting it into Mozilla. Do you know of any instant messanging programs that handle Japanese? Thank you so much! ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2003, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/17 "2003-05-30T02:27:42Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Netbrian \* > **Do you know of any instant messanging programs that handle Japanese?** I use the Japanese version of Yahoo! Messenger, which you can get from [Yahoo! Japan](http://www.yahoo.co.jp/). It runs on a separate network from the English language Messenger, so you’ll need to sign up for a separate (free) account and it won’t communicate with users with the English version. But both versions seem to coexist peacefully - I have both running on my PC right now. ---
**Author:** ![Netbrian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/71e660/32.png) [@Netbrian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Netbrian)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2003, 3:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/18 "2003-05-30T03:40:14Z")
Thank you for the link scr4! My Japanese is still fairly unskilled, so I would very much appreciate a link to the messanger site. Thank you very much! ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2003, 5:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/19 "2003-05-30T05:17:27Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Netbrian \* > \*\ ***jovan** , about how young of girls do that? My pen pal does that, and she’s eighteen (I wanted people reasonably close to my own age, for various reasons.) > \*\* In my experience, girls tend to stop using their own name for the first person in their twenties; I don’t know many women over 25 who do that. Note, though, that this is only in my experience and might vary depending on the social group, the area, and keep in mind that fads in Japan are _very_ volatile, so it’s hard to describe colloquial usage accurately. As for girls referring to themselves as “boku”, mercifully that’s not something I hear much. It is an abomination. But then again, I’m an old-fashioned snob. For Yahoo! Messenger, click on the first button to the right of the Yahoo! logo, the download options will be on the left of the next page. ---
**Author:** ![Yuki](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/8edcca/32.png) [@Yuki](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yuki)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2003, 8:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187/20 "2003-05-30T08:23:05Z")
Just a quick question. I’ve noticed that everyone is writing out the particle ‘wa’ as the character it’s written as, ‘ha’. I thought it was standard, when using romanji, to write out ‘wa’ as ‘wa’. Same for writing out the particle ‘o’ instead of literal ‘wo’ as it’s written in hiragana. Is this another instance of just personal preference? Like writing an elongated ‘o’ sound as either ‘oo’ ‘ou’ or ‘ô’? Sorry if that made no sense, I hope I worded that right. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-requested-from-japanese-speakers/178187.md?page=2)