Apr 10, 2025
Guests:
K, A’chan, S, M, Amanda (M’s friend from Texas)
Discussion Content:
Today we had a special guest. M arrived first and brought her daughter’s friend, Amanda, who is from Texas, so there were two native English speakers in today’s salon – with two different native English accents.
M’s daughter went to the same college in the UK as Amanda, who has been living in Scotland for the past 6 years, and is currently visiting Japan.
K arrived next, and she had already met Amanda before. Next, S and A’chan arrived, and Amanda introduced herself to them.
K brought some flyers about an upcoming art exhibition which she is taking part in, and while talking about that, she mentioned the Japanese word “chanto shita”. I asked if anyone knew what that was in English, and M correctly said it means “proper”.
I said that I like the word “proper”, and for many years often thought if I ever had a business I would call it “Proper” – such as “Proper Bank”, or “Proper Real Estate”, etc., – where everything would be done properly, with no attempt to fool or trick the customers, as many businesses do.
Then, by an amazing coincidence, when my son found a job in Tokyo at a real estate research company, it was called “Propre”, which was pronounced as “proper”. Amanda pointed out that, ironically, their spelling of “Propre” was not proper.
Later, I mentioned how my family had been living in Kawaguchiko, near Mount Fuji, and Amanda said she had recently been there, and there were now so many tourists that all the buses to Tokyo were full, and so they had to wait hours to get on one. And right now, early April, is the cherry blossom viewing season as well, so it’s peak tourist numbers.
Amanda was asked about speaking Japanese, and she said the Japanese word “toru” – usually meaning “to take” – can have lots of different usages. But then she also mentioned how it’s the same in English with the word “take”. We can say “take a bath” and “take a bus”, but we don’t literally mean to take that object away somewhere.
Since this is the first time we had another native English speaker in the salon, I thought it would be interesting to see if the members could tell the difference between the words “bath” and “bus”, and asked Amanda to say each. It turns out that it was a bit difficult for some to catch the difference between the final “s” versus the “th” sounds. And also, the difference between the American English pronunciation of “bath” versus the British English pronunciation.
M said she had an app on her phone called “Bold Oracle” which can analyze your accent and tell where you come from. However, when I tried it, it said my accent was 80% native speaker, 8% Chinese, and 2% Spanish, which was funny.
I said maybe the 2% Spanish was because I had been listening to the Gypsy Kings the night before.
Upon hearing that, K said she LOVES the Gypsy Kings music, that she has all their CDs, and that she used to do Flamenco dancing. She offered to lend me her CDs anytime, but I said they are on YouTube. Most western music is easily available for free on YouTube, whereas most original Japanese music is not, so there’s lots of videos of normal people doing covers of famous Japanese songs.
For some reason, we talked about cursive writing, and I said it’s also called “running-writing”, but Amanda said she hadn’t heard that term before, so I think it was perhaps mainly used for kids in Australia when they first began to learn cursive writing.
Useful phrases:
proper
real estate
ironically
peak
analyze
Upon hearing that,
cursive writing (running writing)