CHICAGO ¨C I finally got around to watching ¡°Queer Eye: We¡¯re in Japan!¡± The four episodes took me longer to watch than most shows because I found myself rewinding to •ø¤Ð´¤¹ (kaki-utsusu, transcribe) the Japanese language in the show.
Netflix didn¡¯t provide Japanese subtitles (Japanese subtitles over Japanese audio is a great study method), so transcription was a helpful technique to shake the rust off my listening skills and ensure I was catching every ¤È¤¤¤¦ (to iu, a connecting phrase loosely equivalent to ¡°such a¡°), ¤Ê¤É (nado, et cetera) and ¤¹¤´¤¯ (sugoku, incredibly) that helped connect or modify phrases. The language used by participants was also a fascinating crash course in talking to others clearly and openly about who you are as a person, which isn¡¯t always easy to do in any language, let alone a second one.
One interesting commonality between the participants, who couldn¡¯t be more different from each other, was how they described the changes they went through during the show using the word ×Ô·Ö (jibun, self/myself/me), which was incredibly prevalent. This isn¡¯t a surprise given that, in Japanese, speakers rarely use pronouns to discuss themselves.
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