Don't you understand Japanese?

A quick background: different areas in Japan speak very, very different languages.  To the point where people from Tokyo literally can't understand people from the western side of Aomori.  Take like the thickest Boston/Texas accent and mix them with a Snoop Dog vocabulary and you can imagine how different Japanese dialects can be.

Anyhoo, one of our office workers is from the west side of Aomori and he speaks a pretty thick Tsugaru-ben (crazy dialect).  He starts talking to a random teacher this morning and the conversation went like this.

Tsugaru-dialect speaking teacher: "blahblahblahcantunderstandblahthickdialectblah"

Toki sensei: "what?"

Tsugaru-dialect speaking teacher: "blahblahblahcantunderstandblahthickdialectblah"

Toki sensei: "what?"

Tsugaru-dialect speaking teacher: "BLAHBLAHBLAHCANTUNDERSTANDBLAHTHICKDIALECTBLAH"

Toki sensei: "what?"

Tsugaru-dialect speaking teacher:"Don't you understand Japanese?"

Toki sensei: "I understand about as much as Tomasu."


Boo yea! Toki sensei was the happy recipient of a small piece of chocolate this morning.  :)