Sir, when Japanese people get tired of speaking Japanese, do they speak English then?
No, they never do, because they never get tired. Do you get tired from speaking English, and then you begin to speak Spanish?
Miss, …if Japanese children learn hiragana without a, b, c, d, how do they remember then that か is ‘ka’?
Miss smiled. That was a tricky one… How do you open a door without reading instructions?
One Japanese child wondered, if people have blue eyes, do they see everything in blue?
No, they don’t.
Why are Japanese people’s eyes so large?
Because their irises are dark brown and therefore one cannot tell them easily apart from their pupils. It is easier to tell the blue iris from the dark pupil. (The child had seen some cartoons and thought…).
Sir, why doesn’t everyone just learn English? Japanese is so difficult.
Because there are more people in the world who speak Spanish, or some form of Chinese and they don’t want to learn English. Why don’t we all learn Japanese, because there are 125,000,000 Japanese who do and that is a whole lot more than us. The student said: “Now you are just being silly, Sir”.
Sir, why do the Japanese have two “alphabets”, surely one is enough?
Because English also has two sets of letters. (Huh? Really?) Yes, capital letters and small letters and many students struggle to keep them apart and to remember when to use capital letters and when not.
Miss, why do the Japanese need so many hiragana? It’s just too difficult.
Because with your 46 hiragana you can write the whole language the way it sounds. The problem with English is spelling: you have to memorise so many words!
Sir, if life in Japan is so expensive, why don’t they come here? It’s much cheaper here.
Because we would have 125,000,000 Japanese here, everyone would speak Japanese, no one would speak English and everything here would be more expensive than in Japan. (It wasn’t the money that worried the student; it was more the thought that everyone would speak Japanese and she wouldn’t be able to understand them that caused a panic with her).
Lami Japan 