If you work with foreign employees, knowing a little of their native language makes it easier to see why their written Japanese sounds "unnatural." You don't need to be fluent; with just a small vocabulary and a feel for the grammar, you can fill in many misunderstandings by inference.
This page was translated from Japanese by AI. If anything is unclear, please refer to the Japanese version.
I have run a local company in Vietnam for more than 10 years. My Vietnamese is just good enough to manage reading and writing for work. I need help from AI translation for long texts, and in longer spoken conversations, I miss about 80 percent of what is said.
Even so, studying even a little Vietnamese changed several of my interactions with Vietnamese employees. Based on that experience, this article is about "knowing just a little" of your foreign employees' native language.
You may sometimes feel something is off about the Japanese your foreign employees write or speak. The subject is missing, the word order is strange, or it seems to make sense but doesn't quite.
Much of that "unnaturalness" comes from translating the grammar and expressions of their native language literally into Japanese.
When Japanese expressions are translated literally into English, the meaning can change or become unintelligible. What would "otsukaresama desu" become if translated literally into English? The same thing happens in the direction from Vietnamese to Japanese.
For example, Vietnamese has the word "mệt." The dictionary meaning is "tired," but in Vietnamese, "mệt" is also used when you feel unwell. At one point, a Vietnamese employee posted "I'm tired" in English as the reason for taking a day off. When one person wrote "I'm tired," others copied and pasted it. From then on, everyone's reason for taking time off became "tired." I didn't understand what it meant, but when I learned that "mệt" also means "to fall ill," it finally made sense.
One more example. The Vietnamese word "nghỉ" means both "to take time off" and "to quit." Every time I see "nghỉ" in the company chat, my heart skips a beat for a moment: "Are they quitting?"
As I mentioned at the beginning, I lived in Vietnam for more than 10 years, yet my Vietnamese is only good enough to manage reading and writing for work. I can handle short everyday exchanges, but I quickly reach my limit when the conversation gets complicated.
Learning a foreign language is truly difficult. Just as some people cannot speak English properly even after studying it for four years at school, simply living in a country does not mean you will pick up the language.
Because that is my own situation, I know firsthand that it is unreasonable to expect fluent Japanese from foreign employees who received only a few months of training before coming to Japan.
The other person's delight at your saying "Xin chào" lasts only a moment. Still, the effect should not be underestimated.
For example, Vietnamese people may care about age when meeting someone for the first time. Vietnamese has forms of address that change depending on the age relationship, such as anh (an older man), chị (an older woman) and em (someone younger). Asking your age is essentially a practical check to decide on the appropriate way of speaking. If you know a little about how Vietnamese works, you will see there is no need to feel uncomfortable.
Even among Japanese people living in Vietnam, those who study Vietnamese are actually a minority. I wrote that I "can't really speak it," but among Japanese residents, I am actually one of the better ones.
If Japanese people in Japan, especially bosses and company presidents, knew even a little of their employees' native language, that alone would change the distance between them and their foreign employees.