Aku (akan) Berjalan Seperti Orang Jepang

Seandainya suhu di Bandung ini sepanjang tahun, sepanjang hari, dan sepanjang umur selalu berkisar antara 10 – 20 ºC, maka kemungkinan 90% saya akan selalu jalan bila ke kampus. Sebagaimana diketahui, sembilan dari sepuluh percobaan perjalanan menuju kampus, saya menggunakan sepeda motor. Sisanya, saya jalan. Itupun sebenarnya bukan untuk urusan kuliah yang penting. Padahal, jarak tempat saya tinggal dengan kampus mungkin hanya sekitar 3-4 kilo jika ditempuh dengan berjalan kaki. Rutenya beda antara ditempuh dengan jalan kaki atau dengan kendaraan.

Conversation With Japanese Men

Well, yesterday is my first conversation with a japanese man. Actually, not just one man, but two men. If I count the foreigner from Mexico then it means I have conversation with three foreigners I’ve never met before. How can I met them? I met them in a KIDS program in ITB, cooperative program between HMP (Himpunan Mahasiswa Planologi) and Disaster Prevention Research Institute of Kyoto University. KIDS stands for Kyoto University Institution for Disaster Prevention School. I don’t want to explain about this KIDS now, I want to tell you the conversation I did with the Japanese during this two days program.

There are four foreigners in this KIDS group, three from Japan, and one from Mexico. One of the “three musketeers from Japan” is a professor, and the others are the students, including the mexican. The students’ name are Shinnosuke Choujin, Tsutsumiuchi Takahiro (his nickname is Cuci…weird for us, eh?), and Nelson Hernandez, the Mexican. Okay, I can recognize what Nelson says because he speaks clearly. Maybe it’s because he’s from Mexico?

At first, I know that it would be difficult to talk with japanese (I know it from my experience watching the japan’s anime, their english articulation is a mess…). Yeah, honestly I don’t want to talk in english with japanese people because it’s quite difficult to recognize their pronunciation, their articulation. So, I’d like to talk with them with Japanese language. Unfortunatelty I can’t speak japanese, so I had to speak with them in english. Then, when I hear Cuci speaks english…(the Indonesian response, originally from Surabaya)… “Damn! This is a disaster for me! I can’t recognize even just one word from him! Heeeelp!!” ……… That’s my first experience in direct conversation with Japanese…. Not good….

It’s Cuci, not Choujin. Choujin speaks english better than Cuci. He’s more fluent and quite clear in pronunciation. Although he’s better than Cuci, doesn’t mean I can speak with him fluently. There are still problem with his articulation, difficult to recognize what he said, and my vocabulary sucks, I can’t speak too much…. So we stuck in conversation…… “Damn…. is this my first experience in conversation with Japanese?” I said.

Anyway, it is still easier to talk with Japanese, compared with my experience in Singapore. There, they speak english compacted with their own accent, become “sing-lish”, singapore-english.

When I was in a gamestore…
Me: “Excuse me, can u tell me what kind of game is this?”
Merchant: “Aaaaa… dat is BLA BLA BLA…. Yu can CANG CING CONG with that… Yu want to buy it?”
Me: “What the…. what did he say before???”

See? It’s like they speak ENGLISH with their own language, but mixed with their own accent!

Haaaaa…… I thank God I’m an Indonesian… because I think we, Indonesian, can speak foreign languages clearly, although we still brought some dialect from our birthplace… Like my friend, he’s from Yogyakarta. He speaks english fluently, but with full-“medhok” dialect. It’s funny, but still he speaks clearly and I do understand what he said. Not just english I think, Japanase, Mandarin, Italian, French and German too. So, Indonesian people has many adventages in foreign language. We just don’t waste this adventage, right?

Nb: I thought that the professor speaks english fluently…. but the reality is… Choujin’s english is better then the professor…. really… this is really happened… why did this happen?