Quick Tip: How To Say “You’re Welcome”

どういたしまして (do-i-ta-shi-ma-shi-te) You’re Welcome

Greetings and general pleasantries are typically some of the first vocabulary words one learns when studying a foreign language. With Japanese we learn “hello” as konnichiwa, “goodbye” as sayonara, “good morning” as ohayo, and “thank you” as arigatou, to name a few. Here’s a quick tip: when trying to remember how to say “Good Morning” in Japanese, it may help to recall Ohio, like the state. And if you ever find yourself forgetting how to say “You’re Welcome”, all you have to remember is “Don’t Touch My Mustache”.

The exact origin of the use of the phrase “don’t touch my mustache” is unclear, though some personal accounts date it back to being commonly used in World War II, and some speculate that perhaps it started with Commodore Perry’s expedition to Japan. However it first came about, the idea behind it is that the English phrase “don’t touch my mustache” is thought to sound very similar to the Japanese word for “you’re welcome”, which is どういたしまして (doitashimashite).

You may have to try to say it a few times. Or say it rapidly all together so it sounds like the phrase is slurred, but it does seem to replicate a similarity in its sound.

Don’t Touch My Mustache in Pop Culture

Extending past the confines of the Japanese language classroom, the idea that the phrase “don’t touch my mustache” sounds similar to どいたしまして in Japanese has been alluded to in a couple of instances in American pop culture.

“A Majority of One”

A first example is from a 1961 movie titled “A Majority of One” starring Alec Guinness and Rosalind Russell, and directed by Mervyn Leroy. Alec Guinness stars as Mr. Koichi Asano, a Japanese businessman. Rosalind Russell stars as Bertha Jacoby, a Jewish widow from Brooklyn who ends up moving to Japan when her son-in-law Jerome, who works for the government, has been promoted to a position stationed at the American Embassy in Yokohama. Although in the beginning things between Mr. Asano and Bertha are rocky, eventually Bertha is able to warm up to him. This film is a love story which explores lessons learned in tolerance and prejudice in a time after the war. There is a scene in the film where Guinness and Russell are having a conversation and she asserts that she knows a little Japanese including “you’re welcome, which sounds like ‘don’t touch my mustache’”. You can listen to the conversation here.

“Toy Story 2”

What might be the most popular reference to “don’t touch my mustache” appeared in Pixar’s Toy Story 2. In Toy Story 2, the sequel to Pixar’s original Toy Story, the hero Woody is stolen by a toy collector who wants to sell Woody and other toys he has collected from the same “Woody’s Roundup” franchise to a museum in Tokyo, Japan. This sound clip is from a scene where Al, the Toy collector, is finishing up a phone call with the Japanese investor from Tokyo. They have just accepted his offer for Woody and feeling ecstatic, Al hangs up the phone call with “Don’t touch my mustache”.

Interestingly enough, Toy Story 2 was not Pixar’s last phonetic reference to a Japanese vocabulary word. They included another one in 2001’s Monsters Inc. In Japan, store employees to greet their customers by saying いらっしゃいませ (irasshaimase) when they enter the store or restaurant. In Monsters Inc, whenever somebody entered Harryhausen’s Sushi Restaurant, its employees shouted “Get a paper bag!” which was intended to be a phonetic reference to Irasshaimase. What do you guys think? Do they sound similar?

Don’t Touch Dug Up Potatoes

Transitioning from don’t touch my mustache to don’t touch dug up potatoes, another fun fact about mnemonic gag expressions is that sometimes they can go both ways! A popular Japanese memorization aid is the expression 「掘った芋いじるな」(hotta imo ijiru na), which is a way of studying how to say “What time is it now?” in English. Translated literally to “don’t touch dug up potatoes”, it was first recorded to have appeared in a language study textbook written by Nakahama Manjiro, also known as John Manjiro.

Manjiro was a fisherman who hailed from an area now knows as the Kochi Prefecture of Japan. He and his four brothers were shipwrecked and rescued and taken to Honolulu. He decided to stay on board his rescuer’s ship and was consequently one of the first Japanese people to visit the United States. He studied English for a year in Massachusetts and in 1850 made way for San Francisco before returning to Japan in 1851. Upon his return to Japan, Manjiro worked as an interpreter and translator for the Shogunate, advising on foreign matters. He wrote a book called 「英語練習帳」which can be roughly translated to English Learning Workbook in which the “hotta imo ijiruna” approach is referenced for transliterating English into Japanese.

Other “This Sounds Like…” Expressions

In order to complement some of the phrases brought up in the article today, I thought it would be fun to look into some other “sounds like” phrases that could be used for increasing one’s Japanese language vocabulary. So, here is a short list of a couple other expressions I’ve been introduced to from friends and discovered on the internet that I thought were worth sharing:

ありがとうございます [ arigatou gozaimasu / thank you ] = Arigatou Godzilla-Mouse

危ない [ abunai / dangerous] = Have an Eye!

いただきます [itadakimasu / about to receive [this food] or let’s eat] = Eat the yucky mess

As you can see they kind of somewhat barely resemble the original thing word. Which brings me to my next question:

Is it Passable for Japanese?

While many such expressions including the ones mentioned above may be useful in creating memorable associations with Japanese phrases and vocabulary which in turn could assist with language learning, could they actually be useful as passing for spoken Japanese? They are clever, many are humorous, but for the most part I feel as though they only vaguely resemble the Japanese phrases they are trying to reproduce. Perhaps if spoken with a swift tongue, “don’t touch my mustache” could be recognized as “doitashimashite”, but assuming that the universal association between “don’t touch my mustache” and “you’re welcome” in Japanese does not exist, if it’s enunciated too clearly, it might be missed. And similarly, if a Japanese person were to ask me about the time using “hotta imo ijiruna” I would almost certainly have to ask them to please repeat the question. But regardless of whether you have heard the mnemonic before, or it’s something new for you, or if it happens to be a personal principle that you live by, now you know that if you ever need to say“you’re welcome” in Japanese, all you have to do is remember “don’t touch my mustache”.

So, what do you guys think? Are these helpful devices for language learning? Are they passable as substitutes for Japanese? Or are they going to end up hurting you in the end?

References

• http://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/1277/what-are-the-origins-of-掘った芋いじるな-hotta-imo-ijiru-na
• http://movie-sounds.org/action-movie-sound-clips/toy-story-2-1999/sputtering-dont-touch-my-moustache
• http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2004/09/dont_touch_my_m.html
• http://www.yam-mag.com/reviews/film-reviews/a-majority-of-one/
• http://smt.blogs.com/mari_diary/2005/12/a_majority_of_o.html
• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0198781/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv
• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055124/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

It’s been more or less accepted in the field of educational psychology for decades that mnemonics help people learn a second language. Using mnemonics, you can learn vocabulary more quickly than through normal means.

But aside from all of the academic talk, learning with mnemonics usually feels a lot better too. Nobody likes memorizing things by rote, repeating them over and over and over until they finally stick. Using mnemonics is a process that makes a lot more sense and can actually be fun.

What Are Mnemonics?

Mnemonics are a different way of remembering things. It’s any kind of technique or trick you can use to better learn and remember something. You use something that you already know or can learn easily and connect it with something you don’t.

A mnemonic could be a word, a memory, a story, a picture, an acronym, a song, a dance, or anything else you can imagine. The important thing is that mnemonic is distinct, memorable, and strongly associated with whatever you’re trying to remember.

Confused? It’s a little complicated at first, but let me give an example to break it down a little bit.

A Colorful Mnemonic Example

Schools use mnemonics all the time to teach things like days of the week, the mathematical order of operations, or US states. If that doesn’t seem familiar, then try this technique that a lot of science teachers use.

There are seven basic colors in the rainbow, and they are:

• Red
• Orange
• Yellow
• Green
• Blue
• Indigo
• Violet

Lots of teachers turn this initially meaningless series of letters (ROYGBIV) into a name: “Roy G. Biv.”

Your pal Roy G. Biv

It might seem ridiculous at first, but for most people it’s a lot easier to remember the name of this made-up person than it is to remember the proper order of the colors of the rainbow. Once you have that name memorized, it’s easy to work backwards and figure out why his name is Roy G. Biv and what that all means.

Using Roy G. Biv as a mnemonic might seem gimmicky and silly, but over a decade after I first learned about it in school, I’m still able to easily remember the name and what it stands for. That’s the power of mnemonics.

Types of Mnemonics and Techniques

Aside from constructing colorful, fictional characters, mnemonics are used all the time to help people learn Japanese. There are a lot of different types of mnemonics and technicques used in learning Japanese, covering everything from kanji to days of the week. Here are some of the more common and/or effective mnemonics used in teaching and learning Japanese:

Keyword Mnemonics

Keyword mnemonics are probably the most common mnemonic used to learn Japanese. Here’s how a keyword mnemonic works: you have a word you want to learn. You take something similar to that word you want to learn, and make a link between the two using vivid, memorable imagery. Take this example from our ebook Hiragana42:

There are lots of things you can do to make keyword mnemonics more vivid and memorable: adding in different senses (i.e. smell, taste) into the mnemonic, or overdramaticizing or exaggerating the mnemonic (like imagining the “ひ” nose as a massive, pimply, covered in warts, etc.), for example. There’s a lot that falls under the keyword mnemonics umbrella.

Pictographs

One of the most basic types of mnemonics used for learning Japanese is pictographs, or imagining a picture in Japanese characters. It makes a lot of sense, considering that early kanji were more or less pictographs.

The most common examples are kanji like 月 and 日, which mean moon and sun respectively. It’s easy to imagine 月 as a crescent moon and 日 as a sun.

It can be very effective early on in learning Japanese, but pictographs get hard once characters get complicated.

Songs

Several of my Japanese teachers have used songs in their lesson plans, usually to teach series or patterns of words. For instance, when I was young I learned the order of the kana (あ、か、さ、etc.) through a song. In high school, my Japanese teacher taught us the days of the week in Japanese using the familiar song Frère Jacques, and another song for days of the month.

Movement

For learning directional or physical words, moving your body while learning certain words can be very helpful. Many Japanese teachers teach their students different directions (右、左、前、後ろ、上、下) while encouraging students to point in the directions while saying them. You might touch your hands while learning the Japanese word for hands (手)—stuff like that.

Japanese Learning Resources That Use Mnemonics

Nowadays, lots of different books, websites, and apps use mnemonics to teach Japanese. The most famous example is James Heisig’s book Remembering the Kanji, which pioneered using mnemonics to learn kanji.

Since Remembering the Kanji was released in the 70^s, there have been a lot of resources that have built on that initial concept. Other traditional textbooks, like Henshall’s A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters have also used mnemonics to teach kanji.

More modern resources use menmonics a lot too. Tofugu uses them to teach hiragana in our ebook, Hiragana42 and to teach kanji on WaniKani and in lessons in TextFugu.

Besides all of the shameless self-promotion, other sites like Kanji Damage and Memrise also use mnemonics to teach kanji. Dr. Moku uses mnemonics to teach hiragana and katakana, and I’m sure I’m missing many other resources that incorporate mnemonics.

You don’t even necessarily need a textbook or a website to teach you mnemonics. Sometimes, the most memorable mnemonics are the ones that you create yourself. This can be especially helpful if you’re having trouble with a particular vocabulary word, phrase or kanji.

No one technique or resource will be able to teach you Japanese in its entirety, but if you’re serious about studying Japanese, then you should definitely have mnemonic resources in your arsenal. Take a look at any of the resources I mentioned above or at our list of Japanese resources and find which ones work for you the best.

Bonus Wallpapers/GIFs

Aya has once again provided us with some extra desktop backgrounds and animated GIFs. Enjoy!

Wallpaper (1280×800)
Wallpaper (2560×1440)

GIF (700×438)
GIF (1280×800)

Goroawase means “wordplay” but I think it’s quite a bit more interesting than that. In English, when I think of “wordplay” I think of comedy’s highest and most elegant form of humor: Puns. In Japanese when I think of wordplay I think almost purely of mnemonics (wordplay that helps you to remember things better). If you spend any time in Japan, you’ll see goroawase everywhere, especially in phone numbers. Want to learn how to use Goroawase for this, and other things as well? Read on.

[box type="info"]This post is probably going to make the most sense to people who are at a high-beginner (though probably more like intermediate plus) level of Japanese. The idea of goroawase will be interesting to everyone, no matter what the level, I think, but in order to understand the examples, you’ll need to know hiragana at the very least).[/box]

Goroawase And Phone Numbers

One cool thing about Japanese is that there are basically multiple ways to read some of the same things and there are also multiple alphabets being used (don’t know about this? Read up on it here). With numbers only, there are three different ways (or more) to read each one of them:

1. On’yomi reading(s) of numbers
2. Kun’yomi reading(s) of numbers
3. English reading(s) of numbers

Keep in mind that there are often multiple readings for each section (you’ll see what I mean in a second). On average, I’d say that each number has 6 different ways to read and say it, at least when being used with wordplay. To simplify this out, let’s take a look at a chart that shows all the different number readings. This will be in hiragana/katakana, so if you don’t know these things, you should probably learn them (learn hiragana and you’ll have completed the first step to starting to learn Japanese!).

There are other less common variations on the above chart that exist… sometimes you just gotta stretch and hope for the best, though the table above shows the most common ways to read all the different numbers, when it comes to goroawase.

Also, as you might have noticed in this chart, a lot of these actually are shortened versions of the real thing. For example, さん goes down to さ or いち goes down to い. A lot of these things you just have to get used to hearing and seeing a bit, though they all generally make sense (as in, you could probably figure out that ろ is just a shortening of ろく).

The idea is that you can basically use any of these sounds associated with any of these letters to create mnemonics to help someone to remember a phone number. The words above can be combined, changed around, and so on in order to create a sentence or phrase that makes sense (and will also make sure you don’t forget the number). In America, we could make the phone number 364-3223 be DOG-FACE. In Japanese, you take the number and make something out of the sounds those numbers could be making.

Here’s some examples!

８＝ハ
８＝ハ
２＝に
０＝オ
１＝イ
４＝シ
１＝イ

Put it all together, and you have 母に美味しい (good tasting to your mom). Considering this was a number for a rice-related thing, it makes sense. This rice tastes good to your mom!

This is for a dentist. The last four numbers make up the goroawase ムシバナシ. Make that into regular Japanese, and you have 虫歯なし (むしばなし), which means “no cavities.” Yeah, I think I’d remember that phone number.

I like this one a lot – the three in there, however is a little bit confusing. It’s using the ス from スリー. As you can see there’s a little bit of creativity going away from the chart provided above. The 0348 spell out おすしや (お寿司屋), which is a sushi restaurant. Cool!

There are a ton more of these out there (because they’re cool, and they kind of work!) – the couple of sites I was looking at for examples like this can be found here and here if you want to see some more.

Goroawase In Dates

Now, if you want to be super dorky, you can start taking dates of the year and making days out of them (puns are the ultimate form of comedy, after all), you totally can now. There isn’t really anything like this in English, as far as I can tell (at least to this extent). There’s like something for every third day in Japanese, so if you’re a fan of weird, partially non-existent, made-up goroawase holidays, look no further.

There’s a list of a ton of them over here – I’m going to list some of my more favorite ones right here, though.

１月３日　→　ひとみの日　→　Hitomi’s Day
１月５日　→　いちごの日　→　Strawberry Day
２月９日　→　ふぐの日　→　Fugu Day!!!
２月９日　→　ふくの日　→　Clothes day
２月１０日　→　ニットの日　→　NEET Day
２月２２日　→　ニャンニャンニャンの日　→　Cat Day
３月９日　→　サンキュウの日　→　”Thank You” Day
３月１３日　→　サンドイッチの日　→　Sandwich Day
４月１５日　→　良い子の日　→　Good Kid Day
４月１８日　→　良い歯の日　→　Good Teeth Day
５月３日　→　ゴミの日　→　Garbage Day
８月２日　→　パンツの日　→　Underwear Day
８月６日　→　ハムの日　→　Ham Day
８月７日　→　花の日　→　Flower Day
８月７日　→　バナナの日　→　Banana Day
８月２９日　→　焼き肉の日　→　Yakiniku Day
１１月１０日　→　トイレの日（「いいと」イレ）→ Toilet Day
１１月２９日　→　いい服の日　→　Good Clothes Day

These are totally awesome, I think… though I feel sorry for the one dude who thinks he’s being cute celebrating all of these days and more. There’s always one…

Goroawase And Mnemonics

Now, while phone numbers and goroawase are probably considered mnemonics as well, I’d like to swing around and take a look at another thing goroawase are useful for, which is remembering other random things / numbers.

This list of examples came from Wikipedia’s Goroawase page, which can be found here. I’ll list the ones I find the most interesting:

1492 (discovery of America by Columbus)

• いよくに　＝　”It’s a good country”
• いよくに（がみえた！）＝　”Wow, I can see land!”

23564 (23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds – actual length of a day)

• にさんころし　→　兄さん殺し　→　”killing one’s brother”

3.14159265 (pi)

• さんいしいこくにむこ　→　産医師異国に向こう　→　”An obstetrician goes to foreign country”

There’s definitely more of these. Japanese people seem to like these more than Americans (at least in my experience). Definitely more memorable than “My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nachos” to remember the planets, I think, but then I again maybe I’m just bitter about Pluto.

Other Words In Goroawase

There’s also a bunch of words and phrases that can be created from and converted to numbers that are pretty interesting as well.

• ４６４９　→　よろしく　→　宜しく (definition here)
• １８７８２　→　いやなやつ　→　嫌な奴 (unpleasant dude)
• ５７３　→　こなみ　→　KONAMI (the company konami)
• ８９３　→　やくざ (Yakuza)
• ７６５　→　なむこ　→　NAMCO (the company Namco)
• ３９　→　さんきゅう　→　サンキュウ (Thank You)
• ０８４０　→　おはよう (good morning)
• ７２４１０６　→　なにしてる　→　何してる (What are you doing?)
• ８８８　→　ハハハ　→　Hahaha
• ８８９　→　はやく　→　早く (Hurry)
• ０９０６　→　おくれる　→　遅れる (Late)

I can imagine someone texting numbers for things (like, my friends and I would do the 39 one a lot). Something like…

０８４０　５１。３９。５７３　２　１９。４６４９。

Good Morning Koichi. Thank You. I will go to Konami. Please Take Care Of Me.

You know… to save on texting costs… at least wayyy back in the day when you had texting limits and things. It could also be like a fun little code or word game (like Babigo!) but more difficult, I’d say. I guess that’s why someone created a goroawase generator! 0.0

The Goroawase Generator

The Goroawase Generator (語呂合わせジェネレータ) is a site that’s in Japanese that lets you put in numbers and get goroawase in return. It’s pretty awesome, actually. I put in a bunch of random numbers and got out results that I’d possibly be able to remember later (without having to memorize the numbers themselves). These are totally random plus a few birthdays. This is kind of fun.

• ３２４５　→　ミニ死後　→　ミニしご (mini after death)
• １０２３　→　自由兄さん　→　じゆうにいさん (free older brother)
• ５２９　→　こんにゃく (Konyaku)
• ４３８２９９　→　市民馬糞客　→　しみんばふんきゃく (Citizen horse poop visitor)

If you want to use the generator yourself, just go here and type in some numbers. It can’t come up with something for everything, but it’s pretty darn good. You will have to know some Japanese (I’d say intermediate level or above) to use this, but if you are at this level, go enjoy! I definitely got a few lols out of it.

Now, if you want to see where and how all these numbers are getting pulled and put together via this generator, there’s also a data section.

You can, for example, check out the 5 digit goroawase numbers that begin with 4. Or, if you’re feeling frisky, you can check out the 11 digit goroawase that start with the number 9. Basically, with this page you can see how crazily flexible goroawase can be. I don’t know how many of these exist, but you can almost bet that if it exists, it’s probably findable here. The number is overwhelming (but really interesting to see).

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So, hopefully this post not only helped you figure out why Japanese commercials always read their phone numbers off so funny but also introduced you to the 41 world of Japanese Wordplay. You can write so much just using numbers – and unlike English, you won’t look quite as crazy writing tons of numbers on the wall while claiming “the numbers are saying things.” So, high five for that.

P.S. ４６ TWITTER!

P.P.S. ４６ FACEBOOK?