An Attempt…

「野良犬」は日本語の映画だ。黒澤 明の映画だ。三船 敏郎は映画である。警察の刑事だ、彼の銃が盗まれます。（とても難しい！私の日本語の単語はちさい！）

Okay. The original plan here was for me to write about one of my favorite movies, 野良犬, which was directed by Akira Kurosawa and stars Toshiro Mifune. Unfortunately, this is stretching my limited vocabulary beyond the breaking point!

Let’s see..what can I manage to say about this movie?

面白い.

Well, that’s fine as far as it goes. What else?

色でない。

Hm. That one might be a bit of a stretch. I know what I meant to say there, but I’m not sure that I actually said it properly. As a wise man once said, “If you don’t already know how to say it in Japanese, you don’t know how to say it in Japanese.”

Does it ever occur to you that the vocabulary chosen by Japanese textbooks is not always the most useful vocabulary? For example, but the current chapter of みんなの日本語 includes the vocabulary term “commodity prices”. I’m not sure I have a lot of use for that term.

Here I am trying to describe a nice police procedural movie, and I simply don’t have the words for it.

Oh, well.

It’s a good movie though. Stray Dog.

I did have a little bit of Japanese interaction today, though. There is a guy who I don’t see often but who understands Japanese really really well and speaks Japanese pretty well. He came by to ask for the key that unlocks the cabinet where the laptops are stored.

“Can I have the laptop key?”

Helpfully, I replied, “Only is you ask me in Japanese. 日本語で.”

He knew the word for key but not for laptop. I knew the work for laptop but not for key. Between the two of us, we worked it out, then we had the following scintillating conversation:

ノートの鍵お願いします。

どうぞ。

ありがとう。

どういたしまして。

Okay, so it’s not much, but I can still say, “I got in a conversation in Japanese today.”  That’s definitely something.

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