Say What? (Victor)

I don’t get to hear a lot of the dialect from my area, Osaka, partially because of my bad habit of staying inside my room when I’m not in class, but also because many of the Japanese students in the seminar house, and around campus always try to use English when speaking to me.

Eat and eavesdrop to learn Japanese.

I tend to hear the most of Kansai-ben when I go out to a cafe or restaurant alone, and I have nothing to do but eavesdrop on neighboring tables.

The two most common phrases I hear are ええで which is equivalent to いいよ, and おおきに, the equivalent to ありがとう. This makes sense considering I hear it at restaurants where phrases like “No problem/okay’’ and “Thank you” are commonplace. I was also specifically taught the phrase おおきに at a small basement restaurant in Kyoto called Teppan Tavern Tenamonya, which I highly recommend. At the end of the meal, they gave us a thank you card that says おおきに on it, and the owner, and chef, of the restaurant made sure we knew what it meant and had us repeat it out loud after him.

Let the bourbon flow! Even though I only got cocktails.

Kansai-ben speakers will probably despise me for saying this but another reason I don’t pick up on the dialect a lot is because most of the time it’s not different enough from Tokyo-ben/standard Japanese that I get confused. If I said that out loud to someone from the Kansai area I’d probably get yelled at. I’ve been told by my Japanese professor here that the people who use Kansai-ben are not only very proud of how they speak, but also specifically have a special hatred and sense of superiority towards people from Tokyo and how they talk. I may be misremembering, but the first time I really noticed Kansai-ben was when I went to a bourbon bar called Rogin’s Tavern in the middle of Osaka where an old man was having a conversation with the bartender that I felt I should’ve been able to understand but was having a strangely hard time. Also, it was my first bar experience so that was pretty fun and funky.