Quote:
Originally Posted by YuriTokoro
Hi.
Could you correct my English?
"Tea?"
As you may know, when flying in a plane, the flight attendants will ask you several times what you would like to drink.
I used to say, “Tea, please”. They would give me a cup of green tea.
I always wondered why they gave me green tea despite my asking for tea.
However, this mystery has finally been cleared up. After I would say "Tea, please", the flight attendant would reply, “Green or English?”
At last, I realized that I should have said “Green tea, please.”
If you are a native English speaker, this sounds very odd. But I’m sure that most Japanese people believe when you say “tea”, you mean English tea. It must be a uniquely Japanese notion, but if Japanese people want green tea they say green tea, not just tea.
This is a trivial matter. But now I’m a little bit afraid to speak in English because I might have a lot of perceived notions causing confusion. Learning English is still very hard.
Thank you!
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Very interesting post, Yuri. It definitely illustrates how the Japanese culture has different preconceptions compared to Western countries. I do admit to being confused about the central concept in the first few read-throughs however. This showed me that I also have preconceptions about the basic meaning of "tea", a very useful thing I should be aware of.
Even in Western countries such as Canada and the United States there are preconceptions. Years ago, I was in the U.S. and was surprised at the confusion between "chips" and "French Fries". I was at a restaurant and ordered a sandwich with chips. I said that expecting to get French fries, but when my order came, on the plate with the sandwich was a small bag of potato chips.
This happened once or twice afterwards until I started saying "French fries" when I ordered a meal. No wonder the server looked at me oddly...I was ordering something she wasn't familiar hearing in that context.
As for the revisions:
"As you may know" was put at the beginning of the initial sentence because it works better as a lead-in to catch the reader's attention and get them thinking about their experiences as airplane passengers. The word "may" was added to make the writer's assumption of the reader's experience less of an absolute thing in case the reader has not flown in a plane in the past.
In the next paragraph, two instances of "always" were removed to eliminate repetition. Repeating a word or phrase lessens its impact and could confuse the reader, as it demonstrates the writer's feelings that he or she is not keeping the reader's attention.
Additionally, some verb tenses were changed (eg. replied to "would reply") to better describe the past actions. As a native English speaker, but not one well known to the finer points of proper grammar, it reads better and more accurately.
"Very stupid" was changed to "odd" in the next paragraph mainly due to my feelings on the subject. I do not think what you're saying is stupid, just an illustration of different cultural preconceptions.
Finally, do not let possible preconceptions make you scared to speak English. Interacting with people and finding out about their culture and preconceived notions can only help both sides become more knowledgeable about the world.
Hope that helps, Yuri!
