掲示板 Forums - Those fun moments when they don't think you know what they're saying...

I remember when I was on my way back from Ikebukuro one evening several years ago, I noticed a couple sitting in the corner of the train and saw them pointing over at me. Curious, I decided to listen in a bit...「仏国人？」[in Chinese: "Frenchman?"] Taking Chinese at the time (a story unto itself), I decided to put it to use and somewhat gracefully inserted myself into the conversation: 「我不是仏国人。我是米国人。」["Not French. American."] The couple was taken aback for just a moment, but a brief conversation ensued for a bit thereafter. We were more or less at the limit of my Chinese by that point, but fortunately both parties knew Japanese reasonably well. Anyone else have similarly amusing stories?

I actually had a couple of incidents while living in Japan... the first was a couple of people badmouthing us for being foreigners (Americans are so rude, loud, obnoxious, etc), so I went up to them, politely (yup, whipped out the 敬語) asked the time, then told them (again, oh-so-politely) that since you can never be sure of your audience, they might want to take care in the future to not speak poorly of people in their presence ;) The other situation was even more amusing, if somewhat deplorable. A couple of friends and I were heading home on the last train after a night of karaoke, and a couple of American military guys got onto our train, apparently out to go clubbing in Shibuya. They were unfortunately drunk and completely obnoxious (and probably proving the stereotype to people like the above!) - shouting to each other, jumping around the train car (and landing on people!), generally being horribly rude. My friend and I were apologizing to the other passengers, for just being the same nationality as them! After a while, they started talking about us. I don't remember exactly what was being said, but someone said "Dude, they can hear you!" and the guy who'd been talking about us was like, "They don't speak English!" Now, my friend and I are both white as white can be, clearly not Asian by *any* stretch of imagination, so we just looked at each other and said, "umm... yes we do?"

Americans are NOT rude and obnoxious!!

I once had a language teacher in high school insult the class in the language they were teaching thinking everyone were beginners and wouldn't understand. She seemed very shocked when I got up to tell the principal what she said about us kids.