東大留学生達の「恥ずかしい話」@日本

6-7月に「英語の庭」で英会話パートナーを務めてくれた東大留学生TA達に、日本語にまつわる恥ずかしい経験について綴ってもらいました。

（１）Roy from Taiwan:
When I first came to Japan, I could not speak Japanese really well. So at the Kansai airport, I asked many random people for direction, “大阪駅は欲しい！” repeatedly. But the Japanese seemed so confused, and instead asked me more questions in Japanese. Not until did I use my hand gesture of “walking”, and keep saying “大阪！！” did they realize I wanted to go to the Osaka station and lead me the way. 😂

（２）Gunjan from India:
When I came to Japan, I knew that everyone added さん as a sign of respect since the emails I received were always addressed to me as Joshi-さん (last name-さん), I was later informed that my tutor was “Kim-君 “, I assumed that Kim was the first name and 君 was the last name. Thus, I kept calling my tutor 君-さん for a while 😕. I was thankfully corrected by my confused tutor who was amused at this misunderstanding.

（３）Jayani from Sri Lanka:
We wanted to clarify a JP bank issue, so we went to the post office after practicing a few times on how to say our issue in Japanese. But at the bank counter, we forgot what we practiced. We checked Google translate again in front of the Japanese bank person. She got tired of waiting and asked “How can I help you?” and spoke English fluently. We were so impressed and embarrassed at the same time. We got all our bank issues sorted out without any problem that day.