Japanese Diary 28: Damn you, autocorrect!

[steepholm]

I've recently made a number of Japanese acquaintance via italki.com, and as well as periodic Skype chats we write to each other. I generally put my finished messages through Google Translate just to check I've not said something ridiculous, and it's a good thing I do, because it turns out that otherwise I'd have written an awful lot more about aubergines than I ever meant to.

The worst of my many bad habits is leaving the final consonant off "henshin" (=へんしん=返信=reply), giving me "henshi" (=へんし=変死=unnatural death). More than once I've come within a whisker of apologizing to my new friends for not being able to offer them a lingering unnatural death, only having time to give them a brief one.

God knows what else has actually slipped through the wide-gauge net of my attention, but no one has rung the police as yet.