Learn about asking where something is
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| In today’s lesson, we will cover an extremely important phrase. Where is the bathroom? Without this, you could have serious bladder problems. In Japanese, where is the bathroom is Toire wa doko desuka? Toire wa doko desuka? Broken down by syllable, it’s To-i-re-wa-do-ko-de-su-ka altogether it’s Toire wa doko desuka? Now let’s take a look at the components. First we have toire which is the katakana word for toilet. Now this might sound a little bit crude to our US listeners but the word is actually pretty acceptable in Japanese. So let’s just break it down. |
| To-i-re, toire This is followed by the topic marking particle Va and then the interrogative where which is Doko. do-ko. So to recap what we have so far Toire wa doko literally toilet where and this is followed by desu the polite form of the rough equivalent to the English verb To Be. Finally we have ka a particle that indicates that the sentence is an interrogative all the parts put together give us Toire wa doko desuka? Toire wa doko desuka? Now there is another way to say bathroom which is Otearai, o-te-a-ra-i, Otearai. This word is made up of the honorific prefix O and the words for hand and wash. |
| To use this, we would substitute Otearai for the toilet to get Otearai wa doko desuka? Otearai wa doko desuka? Now when you finally get to the bathroom, there might be one last hurdle. In some cases, only the Kanji or the Chinese characters are written on the doors. Oohh! What to do, what to do? Well you can stop by the website and find the characters for man and woman. Find them inside the PDF or if you have an iPod, click the center button and you could find them there. |
| Be sure to do that or else you would be walking into the wrong bathroom. All right. That’s going to do it for today. See you later which in Japanese is Matane. |
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