The other funny thing was that I learned how Japanese people talk about their meat. I had learned previously that breakfast, lunch, and dinner (in the typically literal Japanese fashion) are, directly translated, morning-rice, noon-rice, and night-rice. In this past class, I learned that meat is simply the animals name ending with the word for meat, so beef is cow-meat, pork is pig-meat, etc. Thus, the American Beef Association’s tagline “Beef: it’s what’s for dinner!” would be, literally translated into Japanese and then back into English: “Cow-meat: it’s what’s for night-rice!” That one had me falling out of my chair, but of course, it required a lengthy explanation to my two Japanese teachers and my German rocket-scientist classmate.
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