As a required part of college, I’m suppose to take a few semesters of a language course. Being a quarter Japanese I decided on good old “Nihongo” because I felt I could learn better knowing I could practice within the family.
On the first day, we were asked why we decided on one of the most difficult language we could possibly learn. The majority response, “To watch Anime without subtitles” or “To read Japanese Manga.” I rolled my eye at the thought that most of my class being weebs, but it was eventually put to the back of my mind. But it wasn’t until this girl, let’s call her P, who would always resurrect that tumor-us thought.
She would wear rather obscure clothing and sit in the corner of the room and read her manga while the professor taught the class. And the way she spoke…I swear based on the way she sounded, her motivation for taking the class to be a anime voice actor from Japan. It was like listening to a Japanese school girl if she had her voice box has been thrown into a blender.
Eventually we got to a section of Japanese 1 where we learned about different form of questions. Today’s example, the “WHO” form. An exercise we did that day involved one person sitting facing away from the rest of class and would try to guess another person in a class based on the sound of their voice, who would say “Who am I?” in Japanese.
One boy, we’ll call him Y, was chosen to sit in the chair and guess while P was picked to be the speaker. Now the other students would actually have trouble making out the voices, since we all really didn’t know one another, and would have 3 guess before we switched people. But once P opened up her mouth of Sugoi he immediately knew and responded with out skipping a beat, “P-san”.
She was flustered as to how she was guessed correctly so quickly and asked with a shrill, “HOW DID YOU KNOW?” To which Y responded, “Because you’re the only voice in this class that sounds like an anime girl.” I was shocked at how blatantly honest he was, but sadly it was the truth. She, of course, pouted the rest of the class and hid her nose in one of her mangas trying to ignore everyone else. And I never saw her again after that semester.