today i learned the difference between the words "penis" and "population" in japanese. and as luck would have it, i learned this lesson the hard way. you see, in english these two words are quite discernible - in fact its difficult for me to imagine a scenario where i could honestly mistake "penis" for "population" in english. at least while sober. japanese, however, is a completely different story. and by "completely different story" i mean that it is way too freaking easy to accidentally say one when you clearly meant to say the other.

so there i was, in the teachers room of one of my junior high schools. this was between classes, so all the teachers were in said room preparing for their next lessons. i was practicing a new japanese grammatical rule i had just learned with one of the english teachers, when i suddenly noticed that everyone around me became uncomfortably quiet for some strange reason. the english teacher quickly came over to me and corrected my mistake. the rest of the teachers around me pretended to ignore whatever mistake i had just made and continued going about their business. since i am still quite dumb when it comes to japanese, i didnt even realize what i actually said until a few minutes later when we were already in class. and by then i had to literally bite my tongue to keep from laughing out loud in front of all the junior high kids at my hilariously terrible faux pas.

the sentence i meant to say was "人口が増えてきました" ("jinkou ga fuete kimashita") which in english means "the population has begun to increase." but i, in my subconscious quest for making terribly awkward yet ridiculously funny mistakes, started off that sentence with a ち ("chi") instead of a じ ("ji"). unfortunately for me, this made an innocent sentence about a changing population size turn into a very dirty sentence about an expanding male organ.

i, nick whalen, while in front of many teachers today, said out loud "ちんこが増えてきました" ("chinko ga fuete kimashita") which literally means "the penis has begun to increase."

ahh, the joys of learning a new language. i almost think that the designers of the japanese language did this on purpose, knowing full well that someday a foreigner like me would accidentally say this exact sentence.