In southern Akita and western parts of Iwate, 「まめでらが？」(Mamederaga?) can mean “How are you?”. That one took me for a loop.
Talking with some of the Aomori folks at skiing events, I can’t understand a thing they are saying if they go full Aomori dialect mode.
I speak a really old Hiroshima-ben accent… I learned Japanese from my Grandfather who grew up in WW2 time… So people ask me “Why do you speak like an old person” and also get so confused when I say things like “Waken” which means “Wakarimasen” e.g. “Waken ja ne yo ne?” which means “I have no idea because I have no idea, you know?”. I blame my grandad and me living in a rural countryside area…
In Kanagawa the farther down south the Miura peninsula you go the more likely you’ll start hearing teenagers and old people ending every other sentence with だべ！！！。
technically means だろう but I get the strong impression it either has a hundred other meanings or is just a generic sentence ender.
My wife calls those clusters of gnats (蚊柱) 脳食い虫
When my wife speaks full on Kagoshima-ben, I have no clue what she is saying.
「はよぅしねぇ」 doesn’t mean “You should die immediately.” but “You should do it quickly.” Same as 「さっさとしね」 in Fukui.
I learned Japanese from a really old guy in Sendai so I have a pretty pronounced Sendai-ben. Very nasally “ng” sounds. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I took a different class with a teacher from Tokyo and I sounded completely different from her.
I don’t think I picked up as many habits from Sendai with vocabulary/phrases but my very first Japanese was from him so the accent stuck.
わんだら、どぉーんやんどもだ！
I live in Aizu and the old folks here that speak full on Aizu-ben are hard to understand at times – it’s sometimes nicknamed zu-zu-ben for all the nasal sounds and z’s that appear. Basically you talk with minimal movement of your mouth (local legend is that this is because its friggin cold outside lol)
Example sentence (that my husband’s grandma asked me once and I could not figure out for the life of me;
なんずーすんごどいぐの？(nan zu sungodo igu no?)
Which is apparently
何時に仕事行くの？(nan ji ni shigoto iku no? What time do you go to work?)
There are some other commonly used words like – かわいい (kawaii/cute) → めげぇ megeh – 大丈夫だ (daijoubuda, it’ll be fine) → さすけね sasukene – 行儀悪い (gyōgi warui, rude or disorderly) → ざまわりぃ zama warii – 行くよ、出かけるよ (ikuyo/dekakeru yo, let’s go) → あいべ aibe – どう/どうする (dou/dou suru, how/what shall we do?) → なんじょ/なんじょする nanjo/nanjo suru
I enjoy learning and speaking Kagoshima-ben.
チェスト and わっぜ being my two favorite words I think.
Father-in-law sometimes uses Enshu-ben (dialect from around Hamamatsu). One of the things I have picked up from him and occasionally use is 体えらい/バカえらい which means “I’m tired/I’m very tired” in like the physically exhausted sense.
Osakaben creates a lot of easy answers to questions like this, but I think the cutest time I’ve heard someone yelling it was when I was waiting inside one of those small ATM places that used to be a full service bank but is now only the row of ATM machines. Some grandma was in there, also in line, but kept peering out the window at probably her husband, who kept fidgeting with parking his bicycle, like he was afraid it was too far out onto the sidewalk and might get in the way of a pedestrian or something. It’s all but silent while we’re waiting to use the ATM, when suddenly baachan shouts (from inside the building, mind you. Grandpa’s outside and can’t hear her), and I’m only attempting transliterating here because the way she spit the words out was so funny: “おいっといてっというっとんねん、バカ！”
Only dialect I’ve experience with is my wife’s Nagasaki-ben.
“とっとってとっとってっていっとったとになんでとっとらんと？”
I was very confused when I first met her grandma lol.
Edit: Another great example of Nagasaki-ben is the video がんばらんば体操 on YouTube. It’s hilarious how I don’t understand half of it.
It’s not a dialect but one my guys will slip into Okinawa ben when he was real drunk and needs reminding no one knows wtf he is saying.
I understand almost nothing in general.
Sometime pepper my language with words I learned from my inappropriately older nagoya boyfriend from first I came to japan.
Certainly not the craziest but my wife’s grandparents are in rural Kansai and it can be pretty difficult to understand even though I’ve lived in Kansai for awhile and use the dialect regularly.
もうじき会えるさきいにな We can see eachother again soon
来年ももんてきいや come back again next year!
also a lot of です —> どす もう90歳どすがなまだ居はりますねん
Learned this from my ex, we live in Tottori
たいぎい >>> tired, exhausted, やる気がない
ほける >>> throw away (trash etc., from 投げる)
気がわりい >>> bad attitude (気が悪い？)
​
The third one maybe is quite unpopular even in here but we use it a lot
いかれっけ or いかんまいけ both means 行きましょう in Toyama dialect.
Not the craziest, but I still use it sometimes.
Ibaraki-Ben has some fun ones. My favorite is from my old Japanese teacher. He was born in Kyushu but moved up here to work at Sumitomo Steel. He made a new friend on the train, and as the guy reached his stop he said
“あ、ここに落ちる！” because you say “I fall off the train” in Ibaraki.
I learned from my in-laws in Iwaki, Fukushima that たっぺ means slightly icy roads/paths.
For example「外たっぺだからあの靴じゃ危ねえべ」
When we visited relatives in a neighbouring seaside village, I happened to bring たっぺ up in conversation and they were like 「たっぺ？」
They had no idea what me or my in-laws were talking about, they’d never heard of it. The in-laws were equally surprised that what they thought was *at least* Iwaki-ben was possibly something more local to the area they live in Iwaki.
I’m British, and I think Japan has us beaten on dialects.
not so crazy but I like how it’s confusing for 標準語 folks when the same word gets used in a different context.
My mother’s side is from Fukuoka, we’ll say なおして/なおす to “put away”… another popular confusion is 天ぷら in Kansai might be さつま揚げ
In Aichi there’s a Nagoya dialect word for bicycle. けった which apparently comes from an old Japanese phrase of ketta-machine literally pedalling machine and I’ve mentioned it to my friends from other parts of Japan and they say they’ve never heard that in their life. Nagoya is seen a like country bumpkins despite being a massive city that has more people than some states in the US. And like parts of the US you travel 1 hour by car and you’re still nowhere. Maybe a gas station.
Hakata-ben via my mom and my relatives on that side — once I hang out with them long enough I start slipping into it too. しゃーしい is useful!
In Fukui (and maybe Ishikawa as well) people use つるつるいっぱい to say something (usually a drink) is filled to the brim
Not sure if crazy or not, but around here “おやげねぇだや” means kind of similar to 可愛そう but with like the feeling you want to help them or something? When I first heard it I was walking with a friend and we saw a stray cat with a limp and she said it. From the situation I could get the vibe but I was like “what”.
Not crazy as it’s a major dialect, but my parents are from the Kansai area so I inadvertently use kansai-specific words while speaking in standard intonation.
One time I told my wife, who’s a Tokyoite, “◯◯をなおしておいてね”.
She looks at the object carefully, then with a rather confused face she says “壊れてないけど？？”
In Kansai, なおす = 戻す (to return), hence the confusion.
relatives from akita, simple phrases like “mamakee” are easy enough to infer from context (you should start eating) but others like talk about money gets confusing because they have different terms for money (jenko), steal (gamotta), get mad, in addition to the whole nda, ndaga, ndebenegana, etc. i think i catch 50% of what they say, they kinda hillariously code switch to 80% standard japanese and talk extra loud and extra slow when it’s obvious i dont understand.
When I first started taking contracts in Iwakuni I was astounded by the way older people speak. I couldn’t understand them and thought I was having a stroke.
Also the words are always mumbled for extra difficulty.
I feel like a total bum in this thread going from Tokyo to Osaka to Wakayama even though my native English dialect is insane.
I guess here they say
〜しか〜 for 〜のほうが〜
Eg: こっちしか安いで
But they stress the し which is interesting.
And in southern Wakayama (mostly old people) the ザ行 becomes ダ like elephant is ドウさん or 全部 is デンブ.
Also ニエル means bruise. 肘がにえてるわ my elbow is bruised. 👍🏻
Not crazy but if you’re not good at remembering I’d it’s aME or Ame just move to Ibaraki. We don’t do intonations and we raise the end of our sentences like Yankees. Also だっぺ is way cooler than だべ
佐世保弁 ー ずんだれ Lazy person
九州弁 ー せからしか Means the same as うるさい
Oh a funny thing so I like Hanshin. So I’m in Osaka after a game like a decade ago. Drinking in hub as you do and I come up across this other gaijin and his Japanese friend.
Picked up the friend.
We eating in a restaurant and I said I thought Osaka dialect is cute. Oh he went balls to the wall Osaka dialect. Even the staff was confused.
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In southern Akita and western parts of Iwate, 「まめでらが？」(Mamederaga?) can mean “How are you?”. That one took me for a loop.
Talking with some of the Aomori folks at skiing events, I can’t understand a thing they are saying if they go full Aomori dialect mode.
I speak a really old Hiroshima-ben accent… I learned Japanese from my Grandfather who grew up in WW2 time… So people ask me “Why do you speak like an old person” and also get so confused when I say things like “Waken” which means “Wakarimasen” e.g. “Waken ja ne yo ne?” which means “I have no idea because I have no idea, you know?”. I blame my grandad and me living in a rural countryside area…
In Kanagawa the farther down south the Miura peninsula you go the more likely you’ll start hearing teenagers and old people ending every other sentence with だべ！！！。
technically means だろう but I get the strong impression it either has a hundred other meanings or is just a generic sentence ender.
My wife calls those clusters of gnats (蚊柱) 脳食い虫
When my wife speaks full on Kagoshima-ben, I have no clue what she is saying.
「はよぅしねぇ」 doesn’t mean “You should die immediately.” but “You should do it quickly.” Same as 「さっさとしね」 in Fukui.
I learned Japanese from a really old guy in Sendai so I have a pretty pronounced Sendai-ben. Very nasally “ng” sounds. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I took a different class with a teacher from Tokyo and I sounded completely different from her.
I don’t think I picked up as many habits from Sendai with vocabulary/phrases but my very first Japanese was from him so the accent stuck.
わんだら、どぉーんやんどもだ！
I live in Aizu and the old folks here that speak full on Aizu-ben are hard to understand at times – it’s sometimes nicknamed zu-zu-ben for all the nasal sounds and z’s that appear. Basically you talk with minimal movement of your mouth (local legend is that this is because its friggin cold outside lol)
Example sentence (that my husband’s grandma asked me once and I could not figure out for the life of me;
なんずーすんごどいぐの？(nan zu sungodo igu no?)
Which is apparently
何時に仕事行くの？(nan ji ni shigoto iku no? What time do you go to work?)
There are some other commonly used words like
– かわいい (kawaii/cute) → めげぇ megeh
– 大丈夫だ (daijoubuda, it’ll be fine) → さすけね sasukene
– 行儀悪い (gyōgi warui, rude or disorderly) → ざまわりぃ zama warii
– 行くよ、出かけるよ (ikuyo/dekakeru yo, let’s go) → あいべ aibe
– どう/どうする (dou/dou suru, how/what shall we do?) → なんじょ/なんじょする nanjo/nanjo suru
I enjoy learning and speaking Kagoshima-ben.
チェスト and わっぜ being my two favorite words I think.
Father-in-law sometimes uses Enshu-ben (dialect from around Hamamatsu). One of the things I have picked up from him and occasionally use is 体えらい/バカえらい which means “I’m tired/I’m very tired” in like the physically exhausted sense.
Osakaben creates a lot of easy answers to questions like this, but I think the cutest time I’ve heard someone yelling it was when I was waiting inside one of those small ATM places that used to be a full service bank but is now only the row of ATM machines. Some grandma was in there, also in line, but kept peering out the window at probably her husband, who kept fidgeting with parking his bicycle, like he was afraid it was too far out onto the sidewalk and might get in the way of a pedestrian or something. It’s all but silent while we’re waiting to use the ATM, when suddenly baachan shouts (from inside the building, mind you. Grandpa’s outside and can’t hear her), and I’m only attempting transliterating here because the way she spit the words out was so funny: “おいっといてっというっとんねん、バカ！”
Only dialect I’ve experience with is my wife’s Nagasaki-ben.
“とっとってとっとってっていっとったとになんでとっとらんと？”
I was very confused when I first met her grandma lol.
Edit: Another great example of Nagasaki-ben is the video がんばらんば体操 on YouTube. It’s hilarious how I don’t understand half of it.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xizcxo
It’s not a dialect but one my guys will slip into Okinawa ben when he was real drunk and needs reminding no one knows wtf he is saying.
I understand almost nothing in general.
Sometime pepper my language with words I learned from my inappropriately older nagoya boyfriend from first I came to japan.
Certainly not the craziest but my wife’s grandparents are in rural Kansai and it can be pretty difficult to understand even though I’ve lived in Kansai for awhile and use the dialect regularly.
もうじき会えるさきいにな We can see eachother again soon
来年ももんてきいや come back again next year!
also a lot of です —> どす
もう90歳どすがなまだ居はりますねん
Learned this from my ex, we live in Tottori
たいぎい >>> tired, exhausted, やる気がない
ほける >>> throw away (trash etc., from 投げる)
気がわりい >>> bad attitude (気が悪い？)
​
The third one maybe is quite unpopular even in here but we use it a lot
いかれっけ or いかんまいけ both means 行きましょう in Toyama dialect.
Not the craziest, but I still use it sometimes.
Ibaraki-Ben has some fun ones. My favorite is from my old Japanese teacher. He was born in Kyushu but moved up here to work at Sumitomo Steel. He made a new friend on the train, and as the guy reached his stop he said
“あ、ここに落ちる！” because you say “I fall off the train” in Ibaraki.
I learned from my in-laws in Iwaki, Fukushima that たっぺ means slightly icy roads/paths.
For example「外たっぺだからあの靴じゃ危ねえべ」
When we visited relatives in a neighbouring seaside village, I happened to bring たっぺ up in conversation and they were like 「たっぺ？」
They had no idea what me or my in-laws were talking about, they’d never heard of it. The in-laws were equally surprised that what they thought was *at least* Iwaki-ben was possibly something more local to the area they live in Iwaki.
I’m British, and I think Japan has us beaten on dialects.
not so crazy but I like how it’s confusing for 標準語 folks when the same word gets used in a different context.
My mother’s side is from Fukuoka, we’ll say なおして/なおす to “put away”… another popular confusion is 天ぷら in Kansai might be さつま揚げ
In Aichi there’s a Nagoya dialect word for bicycle. けった which apparently comes from an old Japanese phrase of ketta-machine literally pedalling machine and I’ve mentioned it to my friends from other parts of Japan and they say they’ve never heard that in their life. Nagoya is seen a like country bumpkins despite being a massive city that has more people than some states in the US. And like parts of the US you travel 1 hour by car and you’re still nowhere. Maybe a gas station.
Hakata-ben via my mom and my relatives on that side — once I hang out with them long enough I start slipping into it too. しゃーしい is useful!
In Fukui (and maybe Ishikawa as well) people use つるつるいっぱい to say something (usually a drink) is filled to the brim
Not sure if crazy or not, but around here “おやげねぇだや” means kind of similar to 可愛そう but with like the feeling you want to help them or something? When I first heard it I was walking with a friend and we saw a stray cat with a limp and she said it. From the situation I could get the vibe but I was like “what”.
Not crazy as it’s a major dialect, but my parents are from the Kansai area so I inadvertently use kansai-specific words while speaking in standard intonation.
One time I told my wife, who’s a Tokyoite, “◯◯をなおしておいてね”.
She looks at the object carefully, then with a rather confused face she says “壊れてないけど？？”
In Kansai, なおす = 戻す (to return), hence the confusion.
relatives from akita, simple phrases like “mamakee” are easy enough to infer from context (you should start eating) but others like talk about money gets confusing because they have different terms for money (jenko), steal (gamotta), get mad, in addition to the whole nda, ndaga, ndebenegana, etc. i think i catch 50% of what they say, they kinda hillariously code switch to 80% standard japanese and talk extra loud and extra slow when it’s obvious i dont understand.
When I first started taking contracts in Iwakuni I was astounded by the way older people speak. I couldn’t understand them and thought I was having a stroke.
Akita-ben is super crazy.
https://osusumeshn.com/akita-hougen/
http://www-solid.eps.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~ataru/private/akitaben.html
Also the words are always mumbled for extra difficulty.
I feel like a total bum in this thread going from Tokyo to Osaka to Wakayama even though my native English dialect is insane.
I guess here they say
〜しか〜 for 〜のほうが〜
Eg: こっちしか安いで
But they stress the し which is interesting.
And in southern Wakayama (mostly old people) the ザ行 becomes ダ like elephant is ドウさん or 全部 is デンブ.
Also ニエル means bruise.
肘がにえてるわ my elbow is bruised. 👍🏻
Not crazy but if you’re not good at remembering I’d it’s aME or Ame just move to Ibaraki. We don’t do intonations and we raise the end of our sentences like Yankees. Also だっぺ is way cooler than だべ
佐世保弁 ー ずんだれ Lazy person
九州弁 ー せからしか Means the same as うるさい
Oh a funny thing so I like Hanshin. So I’m in Osaka after a game like a decade ago. Drinking in hub as you do and I come up across this other gaijin and his Japanese friend.
Picked up the friend.
We eating in a restaurant and I said I thought Osaka dialect is cute. Oh he went balls to the wall Osaka dialect. Even the staff was confused.
Like dude I already in your bed.
I should have married that guy.
なんばしょっと!?
よう言わん