Happy Birthday!

One of the more amusing (albeit sometimes frustrating) things about living in a foreign country is the language issue.  You are speaking some pidgin dialect of the local language (inevitably mixed with your own language with a few words of whatever other languages you've tried to learn through the years tossed in) and whomever you are speaking to is speaking a pidgin dialect of your language with bits of their own and whatever other languages they have learned tossed into the mix.

So, conversations sound a bit like this:

Japanese Person:  Akemashte omedito goziemas!  (Happy New Year!)
Melinda: Wakatanai, gomen.  (I don't understand, sorry!)
Japanese Person:  Happy New Year.
Sid:  Omedeto goziemas.  (Happy Birthday!--Of course, Sid thinks he is saying happy new year.)
Japanese person: (Confused look).
Melinda: Gracias! Happy New Year!  (Where did arrigato goziemas go? I guess it was buried deep in the foreign language archive while gracias floated to the surface).
Japanese person: Where you from?
Sid: North Carolina.
Japanese person: (Confused look.)
Melinda: "Watashiwa America jin des.  Anatano osoi des (pointing at Sid).  (I am American.  Then, meaning to say "Sid is slow" saying instead to Japanese person "You are slow.")

And so it goes with foreigners.  And, you can multiply the problems encountered when lots of foreigners get together. Throw a few Koreans, Indians, Dutch, and Russians into the mix and the things you will hear are astounding! And also very funny.  We are all like children playing with the words, saying things we don't mean in languages we don't understand.

For a month now Sid has been wishing people a happy birthday rather than a happy New Year.  We found out only incidentally when my Japanese tutor taught me to say happy New Year last week and translated what Sid had been telling people for him.  Well, it was good for a very hearty laugh! :)