First off, a warning, this post is not clean. It contains dirty things in it. So, if you posses a weak constitution, I suggest you read no further.

So, I can speak decent Japanese. I can get around and I can get deep down and philosophical. I’m not always right, and my accent still isn’t there, but I do well. I do still make mistakes. Unfortunately, I’ve been making quite embarrassing mistakes recently, most notably, the following two:

Around New Years, my girlfriend and I went to this nice town called Beppu. It was quite nice and we stayed there for a night and then went back to my town and met some of my girlfriend’s friends for lunch and what not. With in the first 5 minutes of meeting her friends, we started talking about our trip to Beppu. I wanted to say, “Yeah, [I/we] went to Beppu for one night,” one night in Japanese being “ipakku”. However, for some reason when I tried to say “ippaku” it came out as “ippatsu”, which means “one shot”. So it turns out I said, “Yeah, [I/we] went in Beppu in one shot.” That sounds innocent until you remember that in Japanese one doesn’t “come” one “goes”. So the sentence, one more time, as the people I just met heard it: “Yeah, I came in Beppu in one shot.” Naturally, I was well laughed at.

Brian Schuch