Revised Edition Expanded
Todd Geers and Erika Hoburg
revised by Elisha Geers
TUTTLE Publishing
Tokyo | Rutland, Vermont | Singapore
The Tuttle Story: “Books to Span the East and West”
Our core mission at Tuttle Publishing is to create books which bring people together one page at a time. Tuttle was founded in 1832 in the small New England town of Rutland, Vermont (USA). Our fundamental values remain as strong today as they were then—to publish best-in-class books informing the English-speaking world about the countries and peoples of Asia. The world has become a smaller place today and Asia’s economic, cultural and political influence has expanded, yet the need for meaningful dialogue and information about this diverse region has never been greater. Since 1948, Tuttle has been a leader in publishing books on the cultures, arts, cuisines, languages and literatures of Asia. Our authors and photographers have won numerous awards and Tuttle has published thousands of books on subjects ranging from martial arts to paper crafts. We welcome you to explore the wealth of information available on Asia at www.tuttlepublishing.com.
Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
Copyright © 1988 Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Co. Inc.
Copyright © 2003, 2015 Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
Illustrations by Akiko Saito
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-4-8053-1225-4; ISBN 978-1-4629-1732-7 (ebook)
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Introduction
So no one understands your Japanese? Worse yet, you don’t understand theirs. You’ve planned your Saturday night, spent a week studying one phrase, and you can’t wait to use it. You’re at a club, armed with the latest edition of Learn Japanese in 27-and-a-1/2-Minutes-a-Day for moral support, and you lay the phrase on that good-looking local. What happens? The response isn’t like in the book. Why?
Basically, because the Japanese don’t play by the book when it comes to their daily language, just as Westerners don’t. So what can you do? Well, you could give up and decimate your chances of getting with anybody, or you could learn to speak real Japanese.
Just as we speak in a relaxed, colloquial manner, so do the Japanese. On trains, in bars, during ball games, or when getting intimate with their partners, they all use shortcuts—it’s only natural! If you want to talk the way the Japanese do, then you need to know what to say, how to say it, and when to say it.
And better still, you’ll need to know the cultural context it all happens in. We’ve built in lots of little morsels to help you paint a picture of the real Japan as you go along—this book will be your roadmap on the path to love and satisfaction in Japan! Right then? Okay, let’s go!
INFORMATION
It’s tricky to teach the proper pronunciation of a foreign language in a book, so we’re not going to try, hoping you’ve already got the basics. To help you out, though, we’ve joined two and sometimes three or four words together, to make compound words or phrases that are easier to pronounce. Most of them are hyphenated to highlight merged words, to emphasize the slang suffixes and particles, and to facilitate pronunciation and memorization.
For example, the components of fuzakenaide-yo (ふざけないでよ）are: fuzake (from fuzakeru), naide (command form of arimasen), and the (quite forceful) suffix -yo. We’ve written the compound phrase fuzakenaide-yo so that you won’t pause while pronouncing it, but say it entirely in one breath; a pause would weaken the impact.
We’re sure that you’re familiar with the polite question forms des-ka ですか and mas-ka ますか. Forget them. Except for a few needed for talking to strangers, requesting services, etc., the rest have been dismissed. In informal speech, rising intonation takes the place of these forms. Thus, the final syllables of all words and phrases in this book ending with a question mark should be pronounced with the kind of rising intonation we give to the question “Right?”
Slang that is too faddish is not included in this book, because such words come and go too quickly. If you use old slang, the reaction of your Japanese date will likely be, “He thinks he’s being cool speaking like that, but nobody says that anymore. Hah, hah!” So we’ve avoided hot slang—if it’s out of date people will think that you’re funny or square. But feel free to use what you pick up on the street.
VARIATIONS
The terms “boy” and
