Umino mentioned how some beginner students had asked her to teach the Kansai dialect as spoken in Osaka. One recurring theme in the manga is the mismatch between the highly controlled language in student’s textbooks and what they hear in their everyday lives, which is often nonstandard or colloquial. Although it became apparent that not all students were volunteers, many of them being forced to learn by their companies or parents, she soon came to enjoy the lively multicultural atmosphere of basic-level classes.
As she explained in an interview with, she made the switch to instructing foreign students because she thought it would be fun to teach people who had chosen to learn. Umino began by teaching Japanese to Japanese students at an Osaka high school. (From Nihonjin no shiranai Nihongo) Standard is Safest Japanese people count things differently depending whether they’re animate or inanimate.But in China, tiao (条) is used to count both rivers and snakes….A snake is ippiki (一匹) because it’s an animal.Remember that something long and thin is ippon.We call these words for counting things josūshi (助数詞).An apple is ikko (一個) and a carrot is ippon (一本).While it was written originally for Japanese readers, the manga format makes the series quite approachable for foreign learners. Students grill Umino with testing questions, and the discussions regularly veer into linguistic and cultural differences between Japan and their own countries. They cover such areas as keigo (honorific language), counter words, and the history of hiragana and katakana. There are now four main entries and a supplementary workbook in the series-which has sold more than 2 million copies-as well as a television adaptation. The manga also appeals through comical misunderstandings and cross-cultural communication with a cast of enthusiastic international students. As the title Nihonjin no shiranai Nihongo (The Japanese the Japanese Don’t Know) indicates, on one level it was a chance for Japanese people to rediscover their own language. When the Japanese language teacher Umino Nagiko turned her classroom experiences into a manga, created with her friend Hebizō, it became an instant bestseller. Nihonjin no shiranai Nihongo (The Japanese the Japanese Don’t Know)
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