posted
Jenni loves it when the older lady from Japan comes in to teh store where she works...she gets to pratice!
Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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Isn't it, though? Through him, she found out that this woman, whom they had taught but not converted, had continued to be taught by other missionaries, and was preparing to be baptized. Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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quote:Isn't it cool when people assume you can't understand them?
That is cool, but my best/worst story involves making someone think I understood when I didn't.
Right before I got engaged to marry my now wife, I pulled a mean mean joke on her.
We were sitting on the couch snuggling when she said, "I wish you spoke Japanese so you can talk to my parents."
"Oh, I can speak Japanese" the jokester in me lied. "You CAN?" "Yeah, didn't you know?"
*We had been dating almost a year and she knew I speak (or at least used to) Korean*
"I thought you speak Korean!!!?" "Yeah...and Japanese. I taught myself." I was taking the joke too far. I could feel it. "NOOOOO. I would know if you speak Japanese." "I can't believe you didn't know. Go ahead, speak to me."
At this point she said something skeptically in Japanese. I tried to my best to repeat what she said--the grammar is similar to Korean, and I pulled it off. Her eyes grew wide with excitement. Jumping up she said, "……" wait, I don't know what she said--I don't speak Japanese!
But I did jump up with wide excited eyes and tried to repeat, with an excited but muffled voice, some of the words she said.
Her eyes beamed and she spoke more excitedly. I jumped up and down more excitedly. She was almost crying with shock and joy and was talking so fast in Japanese. I matched the enthusiasm, jumped up and down, and just spat out gibberish. She was in Heaven--for about 4 minutes. Yes, we carried on a conversation in Japanese for 4 minutes before I realized I had to tell the truth.
In middle of her bright eyes, childish grin, and grateful heart, I had to say, "It's a joke."
"Huh?"
"It's a joke. I really don't speak Japanese."
At that point, I felt like I was David Brent in the first episode of The Office, and the air was the uncomfortable audience watching me be an a**. She didn't call me a "Wanker," but the deflation in her body language was much more penetrating.
She sat stunned in silence, and for about 15 minutes she would occasionally test me to see if I was joking. She had projected Japanese into my gibberish and did not want to give up the hope so easily.
It's amazing she said yes when I proposed.
Posts: 2445 | Registered: Oct 2004
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I've got to say, that scene from The Office was the first thing that leapt to mind when I read your story lem. Ouch!
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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One of our favorite games as missionaries was called "Busting Grummits." Basically, when we were on a bus or something and teenage girls were making comments about us (how cute we were/weren't, whether or not we were virgins, how stupid our nametages looked, etc.), the missionary with better language skills would casually translate their conversation to the other. Hearing us speak in a foreign language would only reinforce their belief that we spoke no Italian, and they would go on and on.
The game ended when we or they got off the bus; we would smile and say something polite in Italian. The looks we got were priceless.
Well, okay, I guess that was really more a past-time than a game. Hey, when you work sixty hours a week for no pay, you have to find ways to entertain yourself.
Posts: 1068 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Wow, lem, you tell a fine story. I'm laughing so hard I think I wet 'em.
That reminds me of something that happened to my wife. Unfortunately, this was one of the few times that it wasn't my doing... she kind of played this trick on herself.
For any of you who don't know, my wife's first language is Albanian. She speaks perfect English, and if you met her you'd likely never guess that she wasn't an American, even though she didn't come here until she was 19. But she still goes mentally into "second-language mode" when she speaks English. Also Albania doesn't have much of a domestic television industry (or at least not when she was growing up), so she picked up quite a lot of Italian, and a glancing familiarity with other European languages, from watching foreign TV.
So one time just after we got married we were flipping channels at home and a documentary on French ballooning came on. Someone was talking about an historic balloon trip in a heavy French accent. She watched it for a couple minutes, then turned to me with eyes bulging out of her head, and said, "oh my gosh!" "What?" I asked. "I understood that!" "So?" "I didn't even know I spoke French. But I understood every word that guy just said!"
I almost didn't have the heart to tell her that he was speaking English with a French accent. She's still embarrassed by that, and she'll murder me when she finds out I posted this story.
quote:"I didn't even know I spoke French. But I understood every word that guy just said!"
That is like a "bag of holding" with unlimited ammo! You can use that on her the rest of your life! lol Posts: 2445 | Registered: Oct 2004
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