Nihongo Notes 1: Speaking and Living in Japan (1977) by Osamu Mizutani and Nobuko Mizutani — I picked this up at a used book store in Berkeley last weekend. It's a collection of 70 columns that first appeared in
The Japan Times in 1976 and 1977, which chronicle the misadventures of a fictitious Mr. Ernest Lerner (ha ha), as he struggles to learn the finer points of the Japanese language. The columns are quite informative, covering matters of pronunciation, grammar, and especially idiomatic expressions. Some address things that I already knew, of course, but I still managed to learn a fair amount.
Mr. Lerner's blunders are often humorous. When I read this:
I put my foot in my mouth again today. When I introduced Miss Winters to my Japanese friends I meant to say Edo-bungaku-o kenkyuu-shite-imasu (She's studying the literature of the Edo period). But my "d" sounded like an "r," so...
I was laughing out loud before I even reached the explanation:
...what I actually said was "She's studying pornographic literature."