Re: Alphabet (you're a fish?)
| From: | Tristan Alexander McLeay <anstouh@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, November 4, 2001, 5:54 |
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At 04.07 a.m. 4.11.2001 +0000, you wrote:
>Hmm, someone once answered "watashi wa sakana desu" to the teacher in
>one of my Japanese classes... though I didn't get the joke at the
>time.
>
>Another guy translated in a puzzled manner "What? I am a fish?" and
>the teacher replied that it actually made sense; you could order food
>in a restaurant like that, "As for me, I (would like) fish".
I was always taught that 'X wa Y desu' meant 'X is Y'. We did many a
role-playing thing where you went into a restaurant and ordered food, and I
don't think I ever heard of 'watash wa Y desu' being 'As for me, I'd like
Y'. But I had a dodgy Japanese teacher (who can't even speak English (her
L1) right, I wouldn't be trusting her to teach Japanese to VCE students and
the best state school in Victoria), so I may've missed it or something.
Apropos of weird statements in Japanese, I was once forced to construct the
sentence 'rajo* wa oishi** desu' in Year Eight.
* Or 'rajio'? Radio, at any rate. I haven't had to use the word since I
said that.
** Or is it 'oishii'? I also haven't used that word, nor that gramatical
structure, since last year.
Tristan
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