Taking up Japanese as a side project for myself has reminded me of something.
So like a long time ago I had a professor that I absolutely adored. She happened to be Japanese American. She grew up speaking Japanese at home but never really spent a lot of time in Japan. She mostly spoke with other Japanese Americans and read books.
So one day early in her teaching career there’s an exchange student from Japan who’s having a hard time understanding a concept so she explained it to him in Japanese and then he looked absolutely rattled. Like in shock. Pale.
This is how she learned that the way she speaks Japanese makes her sound like a gang member.
Japanese doesn’t exactly have cuss words in the same way as English does but imagine that the nicest professor you’ve ever had pulls your paper over and says “Okay listen here you little piece of shit I’m gonna fucking explain this to you. Violently.”
This (studying in Chile for a year) is more or less how I realized my two PhD-having, tenured professor expat parents raised me to speak the most disrespectful and swearword-riddled version of Spanish possible (with plenty of ancient slang I didn't know was slang thrown in). It was like:
