Why did the chicken cross the road? and other linguistic challenges

Why did the chicken cross the road is a classic joke, but we recently found out that it's very much an English-speaking-culture joke. We had dinner last week with two colleagues, one Australian and one German. After dinner we served our Australian guest tea in a mug that had a version of the chicken-road joke. It was a "Far Side" comic. She loved it, but confusion took over as we tried to explain to our German guest the meaning of the joke. She's fluent in English, but didn't understand why that version (or the original) made us smile. (The joke turns out to have quite a history, check it out here.) Humour is so much more about culture than it is about language.

We continued talking about humour and I brought up the example of Mr Bean. I'd thought he was pretty clever with his non-verbal humour that seems to be appreciated across cultures, but our friend tells us that in Germany, Mr Bean is seen as "British humour"!

Most of our colleagues and friends are not Australia, many are not native English speakers either. Sometimes people in Australia notice that our English isn't quite as Australian as it used to be and it's because we've spent nearly 24 years living and working outside of Australia in multicultural environments. It means some of our word choices are different, for example, I tend to say "bathroom" more often than "toilet" these days, simply because it's less likely to cause confusion or offence. I used "rush hour" just this morning and found out that "peak hour" is more often used in Australia. Probably "gas station" comes out more often than "petrol station". I tend not to use colloquial words like "arvo" or "footy" and geographically-tied words like "ute" (pickup truck) and "regional" (yes, this word is used differently in Australia to other parts of the world). Our accent has become more "international" and we probably don't lengthen our vowels as much as many Aussies do.

My work as an editor and writer means that words are on my mind a lot. Almost all I write is for an international audience. Both my jobs are with international teams who speak different kinds of English, or have English as their second, or third language. Linguistic challenges are often on the table for discussion, hence my apparently well-known "Wednesday Words" Facebook statuses. The other day I tried to set up an online meeting with a British colleague and American colleague. Communication went a little bit awry with what I suspect was a hastily written email by our British colleague that confused my American colleague. Each of us had a slightly different understanding of what had been written. No big deal, as far as I know. But it could easily have been.

Working in an environment like this can make you think more carefully about the words you use and how you say them. A good communicator thinks more about their audience than they might have in their own country. For example, if I'm talking to an American, I would tend to say "ketchup" not "tomato sauce" or "candy" not "lolly". If I'm talking to a friend who speaks English as their third language I might choose simpler words and sentences than I would when speaking to my Australian or British colleagues, not because my friend is unintelligent, but as a way of respecting them by speaking in a way they understand.

It might be a surprise to you, but the differences between our English go way beyond spelling, word usage is a big difference, and not simple biscuit vs cookie vs scone. Will I stand at the back of the room, or in back? Is it good or bad news if I hear "you lucked out"? Is the chicken walking in the road or on the road? But I think it's time I hopped on my bike and rode on the road to the grocery store.

International is normal

These last two days I've had quite different lunches to what I usually do. Let me give you a taste.

Monday
On Monday I joined with a group of five other mums who have children in grade nine at CAJ. We ate lunch at one of their houses. This was not an ordinary lunch, and that's due to the ladies who were present.

Yummy Asian lunch!

I was the only 100% Caucasian lady there. The other ladies were various combinations of Korean, US, Japanese, and Chinese. And by various combinations, I mean that my background was one of the least complicated (I've only lived in two countries and I'm the same nationality as my husband and both my parents and the country I grew up in). Two or three of them are raising multiple nationality kids too (husbands with a different nationality than the wife). Conversation ranged between English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, so I'm not sure that anyone got 100% of what was said, least of all me, probably the least multilingual person there.

The food reflected the ladies present: a lot of Korean, plus some Japanese and possibly more (what's honey mustard chicken?). It was super tasty.

I'm accustomed to conversation about different Englishes, but these multilingual ladies were doing the same with Korean/Japanese/Chinese. If I knew more of these languages it would have been even more fascinating and there are many links between these three languages.

Tuesday
On Tuesday I went across the city to our national headquarters for a couple of meetings, mostly related to me handing bits of my jobs over to others while we're away. In between meetings I got to work in a room called "The Island"! 

My meetings included my Scottish boss (who is pretty fluent in Japanese), another Aussie, a man from Britain who grew up in Japan, an American who is ethnically Japanese and grew up in Japan with an American family, and a lady from Hong Kong. International is our normal!

Our Japan OMF headquarters is aquatic-themed.
This room is called "The Island", upstairs are two meeting
rooms called "The Stream" and "The River". Down the
hall the finance team works in "The Oasis"!

Lunch was with the various people working at the office that day. Our little table had three British people, all who've been in Japan for longer than me, and a bilingual Japanese lady. Topics ranged considerably, from blue cheese, to the Royal Wedding, and ingrown toenails (really!). My semi-regular Facebook status of Wednesday Words came up too, and they had some suggestions! Braces vs retainers, braces vs suspenders, tute for tutorial, trousers vs pants. Such fun, talking about language.

Today
Meanwhile today, I'm back at my little desk in my dining room, trying to discipline myself to attend to little bits and pieces of followup from yesterday as well as other ongoing things that need doing. (But instead of powering through I'm writing a blog post...) 

It's weird to be divvying up my job to give to others and hard to stay motivated for the "now" or to get motivated for the "coming". I swerve between feeling scared about ditching work and feeling relieved! Maybe you don't understand the former feeling, but I have an underlying fear of boredom that sometimes (or maybe more than sometimes) drives me.

Ah, transition. Never easy, no matter how it looks. I know I'll eventually get around to embracing the freedom of handing over these jobs, but at the moment I feel a little like I'm balancing on a slab of ice in the middle of a lake.

Today's language mayhem

The person who came up with this translation "ship shortage",
might have been having a mayhem of a day too.  This was
the reason given for our flight back to Tokyo being
cancelled last June.

This morning I was head-down-tail-up trying to get all the articles for the next magazine issue finalised before going away again tomorrow.

Finalising an article means making sure every detail is taken care of before I hand the articles over to the designers: from the obvious mistakes the proofreader might pick up, to checking on communications with authors about details they are concerned about, to images I've received from authors or a myriad of other small matters that can become big matters if not dealt with at this point.

This is not my favourite part of editing. I prefer content editing where one is looking at bigger picture issues.

So in order to do this end of editing for the magazine I need to work myself into a certain focus. The sort of focus that doesn't allow me to quickly jump in and out.

This afternoon I had my semi-regular language exchange meeting. A time when I get together with two Japanese friends and we try to talk in Japanese and English, helping each other learn. 

Unfortunately I did not allow myself sufficient transition time. I jumped almost straight from editing onto the train and into chatting. My "Japanese brain" simply didn't snap into gear. Especially as they wanted to hear about our son's wrestling! And that is something that I almost never talk about in Japanese, so my vocab is pretty limited. Not to mention that they had a lot of questions about specifics that are challenging to explain, even in English.

So I went from thinking about a sentence like this:

US authors may object to “maths” being used in place of “math” in their writing, just as Commonwealth-background authors might protest about “cilantro” replacing “coriander” (the leaf, used in cooking) in something they’ve written. 

To trying to figure out how to explain "pinning" in Japanese (not knowing the word for shoulder blade and forgetting what verb I could use for "holding someone down").

Thankfully my language exchange partners are very forgiving and don't mind if we end up doing more English than Japanese. It is I who tends to beat myself up.

So we ended up talking about all sorts of things in a mixed-up way. Not the best for language exchange, but still fun.

Something that struck me later as I walked home, was the number of times I talked about "the feeling" of a word. Words like "seedy" and "balmy". Even talking about a "white elephant" and how it isn't just something that is useless, but it carries the feeling of an encumbrance.

The "feeling" of a word is very important. It's something that you only get when you are becoming familiar with a language. For example, when you put  the word I've used in the title of this blog post: "mayhem" into the thesaurus, you come up with words that are similar, but not necessarily quite the same. For example, "violence" and "destruction".

Similarly in Japanese. I only can think of poor examples, but I learned the word for energetic or lively: "nigiyaka" when I was at language school and applied it to my son, but was immediately corrected. "That is only used for events or situations, not people," I was told. The word "gambatte" is a Japanese word that isn't easily translated, but means something like "do your best" or "try as hard as you can". The feeling of the word is one of encouragement, with an edge of stoicism to it. Something you don't easily get with those English translations I've given.

So anyway, I've learned that I have good days and bad in Japanese. Probably I would have more good days if my job required me to work more often in Japanese. But I've learned to accept that sometimes I'll feel like I'm flying through and other times it is more like a less-than-graceful trek through a bog.

Dental success

Today I not only went to the dentist, I made appointments for three more family members all by myself. I feel accomplished!

Medical and dental are two areas where it's easy to feel very shaky when you're overseas. This week we've been hearing of the medical dramas of friends/colleagues who've just arrived in Taiwan with their toddler and baby for the first time, so don't have much language yet. I feel for them! Thankfully they have had good help from English-speakers.

So we got good dental care in Australia and were told to get checkups six months after we got back to Japan in July last year. Well soon after we arrived in Japan we discovered that the kind dentist I mentioned here had retired. So I was without a dentist. I'd like to write "the hunt began" but it didn't really. It wasn't until April that I finally got around to finding a dentist that would be able to cope with my limited dental Japanese. 

Got to love their English, though. The conclusion on my teeth when I finally got an appointment was "we can't see any cavities or gum disease, so your brushing mustn't be too bad"!

Then they explained that they couldn't clean all my teeth that day. What? They explained that Japanese medical insurance doesn't cover it. So you have to have your teeth cleaned over two separate appointments. I don't know what our previous dentists did (maybe they fiddled the books?) but we've never had to have two appointments just for teeth cleaning before.

Nevertheless, I got the rest of my teeth attended to today, all by myself. And I've arranged for the rest of the family as well! The third boy sees a dentist/orthodontist regularly. They clean all his teeth every time (he's never had such clean teeth). But probably insurance isn't covering that!

Sometimes small things are so satisfying.

I had meant to try to squeeze a ride to the park today, but discovering this morning that I had a mid-morning dental appointment put a stop to that thought. I did ride, though, to the dentist, post office, and two grocery stores. None of them very far away, but it was a short ride and I kept my eyes open for beautiful flowers. There are so many at this time of year! I stopped to take a photo of these beauties gracing an otherwise dull concrete retaining wall next to our river.

Bath tissue

This was on the wall in my toilet cubicle at Costco this morning. In the company of north Americans I've grown accustomed to calling the "toilet" a "bathroom" even when there is no bathroom. Sometimes I'll use restroom, because bathroom just seems too weird.

But this is pushing it too far. All I can see when I read "bath tissue" is a bunch of tissues floating in bath water. Eeew!

Language is funny, because when words are a part of your regular vocabulary you don't even think about the literal meaning or an alternative literal meaning. For example "car park" sounds strange to American ears. To us it is merely a place that you park your car. But they think about parks and how weird it is to have a park full of cars!

What other phrases do you use that makes sense in your culture, but not to people from other cultures?