In this week’s Slang from Japan we look at “胡散臭い” (usan kusai) which refers to something that is suspicious or unbelievable. This uses two words: 胡散 usan – which means suspicious and 臭い kusai – which means smelly. It almost literally means something that “smells fishy”. For example:
彼の言うこと、胡散臭いよね。
kare no iukoto, usan kusai yo ne
What he is saying is suspicious.
I love okonomiyaki.
if you don’t know what that is, wikipedia is your friend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okonomiyaki
A quick summary would be, it’s a pancake like dish served in two main styles, Osaka style (kansai) and Hiroshima style. (I don’t count Monjakayi – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monjayaki – it’s just a mess)
Having just been to Hiroshima, I’ve now sampled both and the grand debate over which is better can now be settled, once and for all.
With Osaka style you do it yourself, mixing a prepared bowl of ingredients together and then slapping it on the hot plate in a pancake type way. Turning it over once in a while you cook it until it’s as brown as you wish it to be, then take it off, sprinkle fish bits and seaweed on it, as well as a nice coating of okonomiyaki special sauce (which I hate) and mayonnaise.
The sauce is the apparent key to it all, as an amazed shop owner asked me ’本当に美味しい？’, which I translate as ‘You eat it without the sauce? Disgusting, surely?’.
My favourite has to be octopus (タコ), closely followed by a cheese version (チーズ), and a pizza version (ピザ). The last one may only come from my local okonomiyaki place, I don’t know. It’s nice thou.
In Hiroshima they don’t mix the ingredients and, by default, layer it with soba noodles. I don’t like soba noodles however they do a version with udon noodles which was better for me. Again, no sauce as it’s horrid, although the end result tends to be a bit dry unless you have it. However, mayonnaise came to the rescue and made for a tasty meal. You can mix and match ingredients as you like, with a similar range of toppings as with the Osaka style. However they cook it for you due to the layering of ingredients which would make it a bit tricky for the customers to do it themselves. As a local specialty on top of a specialty, you can have a oyster one too, which my Japanese friend spooged himself over.
Behind the Parco department store in Hiroshima is the I presume famous okonomiyaki village. There are 4 floors of nothing but okonomiyaki shops (maybe 40 or so in total), all bustling for your attention in a clearly overcrowded market like arena. However none of them seemed to do the oyster version, which a shop a door or two down on the first floor did (the one in the photo).
Overall, which do I prefer?
Osaka style wins. You cook it yourself, which is fun, and it’s moister and comes in a few more varieties as far as I can tell. Maybe I’m just not a fan of the noodles I suppose, although I’m sure if the sauce wasn’t so unpalatable to me things might be different.
If you are in Japan, please go sample some okonomiyaki. There are chain stores all around Tokyo as well as a similar number of private establishments.
Links
Here is a list of podcasts to help you learn Japanese in no particular order.
Japancast.net
http://japancast.net/
Our competitors! A good homegrown podcast done by Paul and Hitomi Griswold. They regularly update their site and have plenty of content for you get your teeth into. Nice format and examples of Japanese from everyday life conversations and anime. Well worth listening to.
Osaka dialect 大阪弁 Japanese lesson in English
http://mayumik.seesaa.net/
I enjoy listening to this podcast as I used to live in Osaka and I can get my fix of the Kansai dialect. The format is simple but effective. You can read the entire transcript of the podcast in Japanese with an English translation. A very good learning resource for learning real Japanese in context.
S-J-P Study Japanese Podcast
http://sjp.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/
From what I’ve heard so far it is hosted by native Japanese with no silly gaijin to mess things up. Minimal English so it’s quite a good immersion into Japanese. Perhaps good for low intermediate and above. Unfortunately they haven’t updated their website recently.
The Linguist on Language
http://thelinguist.blogs.com/how_to_learn_english_and/japanese_podcast/
Not exactly a podcast but you can see Steve Kauffman’s youtube videos explaining how to learn languages all in Japanese. Check out his blog http://thelinguist.blogs.com/ which is concerned on general language learning. Steve’s bio is here: http://thelinguist.blogs.com/about.html Steve Kauffman is the brains behind Japanese LingQ. Steve Kauffman is like El Gringo, a well traveled linguist but with suits.
Japanese LingQ
http://www.japaneselingq.com/
Podacsts are 100% ( from what I’ve heard so far) Japanese so good for total immersion if you are of an intermediate level. You have to sign up if you want to read the transcripts. It has some “revolutionary learning system” a rather questionable phrase in my humble estimation however it’s worth checking out.
Survival Phrases – Japanese
http://survivalphrases.com/japanese/guest.php
Very professional – annoyingly so. It’s so produced and corporate that it sounds like a commercial. Waaay too much English. But maybe good for complete beginners in Japanese.
Nippon Voice Blog
http://www.voiceblog.jp/nippon/
Hmm…Super zannen. I opened the page to find some long transcripts about Japanese culture. Great for reading and vocabulary BUT none of the mp3s were working. That’s probably something to do with the fact that the last entry was back in 2006.
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In today’s lesson Waka sensei teaches us how to use the word 「より」yori which means “more than”. We will deal with other uses of より in a future podcast.
よりdoes have a few other uses. For example, when finishing a letter and you want to write “from Alex” you would write 「アレックスより」Alex yori. There are one or two other exotic uses but I’ll leave that to a future podcast. If you have any questions or ideas, please leave a comment at the bottom of this post. Your feedback is always very welcome.
Although totally unrelated to today’s grammar point, we also talked a little about Okinawa town which you can find in Saszuka in western Tokyo. It’s an awesome little street with some delicious Okinawan restaurants and supermarkets stocking specialty produce. Enjoy!
In this video, Beb teaches us some interesting gestures in Japanese. Can you guess what they mean? Answers are at the end of the video
In this week’s podcast, Waka sensei teaches us how to use the phrase 間に合う/ ma ni au / to be in time. The easiest example of this would be “電車に間に合った” densha ni ma ni atta – I was on time for the train or I made it in time for the train. This is a really useful phrase that I hear all the time.
However I was interested to learn that this in fact has another meaning I had never heard of before which means to “be enough”. For example, “お金は間に合ってる” okane wa ma ni atteru – I have enough money. This isn’t quite as common as the first usage but it is used. Enjoy the podcast.
In this week’s show we learn how to use the verb おくoku.
