Cultural Miscommunications...

Hi everyone, Cultural Miscommunications are when people have trouble understanding each other even though they are speaking the same language. For example:

A: Where do you work?
B: I work in Osaka.
A: Um, I mean what company do you work for?
B: I work for Omron.

Here the native English speak(A) wanted to know the COMPANY the Japanese English speaker (B) works for. But B focuses on WHERE and so misunderstood A. When native English speakers want to know about the LOCATION where you work we say:

Where's your office?

and when we want to know your COMPANY we say:

Where do you work? (company)

Today, I will talk about the difference between these two questions:

Where are you from?

and

Where do you come from?

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Where do you come from?

This question has a negative connotation~! The feeling of this sentence is why are you here? Go back where you came from... This can be emphasized using word stress:

Where do YOU come from?
(meaning you are strange so what planet are you from weirdo?)

Where do you COME from?
(meaning I don't want you here so please go back where you came from)

Also please be careful with:

Why are you here?
(very strong, very negative, TOO direct)

Why did you come to Japan?
(too direct, it feels like you don't want me here)

Instead say:

Why did you decide to come to Japan?
(by adding decide you make the question less direct and so more positive)

What brings you to Japan?
(this is old fashioned but really polite and sounds very nice, please use it! ^_^) This question is great as you can switch Japan for any location:

What brings you to Tokyo?
What brings you to Canada?
What brings you here?

Where are you from?

This is a great question, it asks about where you are from but, without using the word come, loses all it's negative connotations. This is the best and safest way to ask people what country or city they are from.

So please try this conversation the next time you want to speak to a foreigner in Japan~!

Japanese: Where are you from?
Foreigner : I'm from New York.

Japanese: What brings you to Japan?
Foreigner: I'm here on business.

Japanese: Oh? What do you do?
Foreigner: I'm an software engineer.

Japanese: Where do you work?
Foreigner: I work at IBM.

I hope you enjoyed today's lesson, have a nice week!

Phil