Non-Textbook Japanese Corner

Let’s use this topic as a place where we can discuss Japanese you won’t find in any textbooks!
Please keep it clean! :joy:

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My favourite one is ~てんじゃねえよ!
It is an EXTREMELY casual way of saying しないで!
My friends think it’s super funny that I know and use this one semi-regularly.

For example, if my friend is laughing at my singing voice in karaoke or something, I’d say 笑ってんじゃねえよ!
Also, when I was screaming in agony in hospital last year with appendicitis, the nurse in the accident and emergency room said to me 泣いてんじゃねえよ!

Anyway, this is a really funny one :joy:

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食べちゃえ!
The feeling is like: Go ahead, eat it while no one’s looking!
This is like a parent telling a child, while they’re at a family picnic, to go ahead and eat the last piece of cake.

食べてしまう – てしまう form, do something completely or by accident
食べちゃう – spoken form of above
食べちゃえ – spoken command of above

This is a conjugation that totally confused me at first. In textbooks and classes, てしまう is never conjugated into a command, so this made no sense to me. I had to have a Japanese tutor explain this one to me. It’s like, “while no one is looking, go ahead and do this thing that you’re not supposed to”.

(I originally saw this in a ドラえもん manga, where Nobita (and Doraemon) try to make a surprise gift for his dad to make his commute easier by digging a secret personal subway. The episode title was 地下鉄を作っちゃえ!)

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I find that sometimes I end up on “What are these crazy new words the kids are using” type articles trying to figure out what youtubers and people on twitter are saying. I’m never certain if the words are worth knowing like ぴえん - sadness, crying kinda meaning, or if I would ignore them if they were in English.

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Spend two minutes browsing HelloTalk and you’ll see all of it, lol. Super hard to distinguish all the typos, emotes, slang, and social-media-style writing!

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I used ぴえん once with my friend on Twitter (she’s middle-aged) and had to tell her what it meant, haha. I wouldn’t usually use something like that, but I’d just picked it up from kids at school and wanted to give it a bash.

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ぴいえん is very common. I hear some of the girls at work use it pretty often. Especially when they have to work overtime. It is very lighthearted, usually they are making a crying face expression when they say it.

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I guess i’m just being lazy sometimes not wanting to worry about who uses a word (age,sex etc), what circumstances and what implications it might have. Though it’s definitely preferable to accidentally ending up sounding like the japanese equivalent to jake paul or even worse if your friend says his wife is sick and you say ぴえん, thinking it’s completely serious sounding.

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How do you use Twitter effectively do help with your Japanese learning? I created one and I see many people recommend it, but I’m not sure what to do to be efficient with it.

I’m a fan of the singer Hikawa Kiyoshi, so there’s… not really much out there in the way of an active English fanbase. If you tweet enough about something, people end up finding you, and through that I’ve made quite a few friends who don’t know a lick of English. They’re fully aware and understanding that not only am I not Japanese, but also my level is still pretty low - I’m pretty sure I’ve committed several JP social media sins that they’ve let slide, but they always seem pleased at my efforts. I have a couple of friends there who are more than happy to message me with corrections and suggestions whenever I cock up, too. We’ve even met at concerts and such (well, before the You-Know-What).

My best advice would be find your niche. Find what you’re interested in, whether there’s an active Japanese fanbase, and try to slot yourself in there as best as you can. Of course, I don’t only tweet about said interest, but now that I’ve made friends through it, I post my general thoughts or whatever too and have someone to actually interact with. I also keep my English and Japanese Twitter totally separate, so I tend not to lean at all on using English when I shouldn’t be.

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Recently I’ve been hearing a lot of ~しかたん. It’s a casual way of saying something is the best.
レストランなら焼肉しか勝たん!

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てんじゃねえよ!

I credit the Jojo manga/anime series for really drilling this one into my memory. I think it’s especially noticeable in Part 4: ダイヤモンドは砕けない The characters place extra emphasis on the じゃない

In general it’s a typical speech pattern of 不良 / ヤンキー type characters, but I agree it’s fun to use in real life, especially as a foreigner.

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