Today is the last day of my three-day lecture at Osaka university. Since I was grown up in Osaka, this city has a lot of things which remind me of many many things. In particular, I am very happy to give lectures at my home town, in my Osaka dialect of Japanese.
It is obvious that when you speak in English (I am supposing that you are not native English speaker), your “nature” should be different from that when you speak in your native language. Your character depends on the language you use. This is in particular the case for me. When I talk in English, my communication “mode” changes. What I like to tell you is that this also applies to the dialogs. In fact, When I talk in Osaka dialect of Japanese, the way I express myself actually changes, compared to myself talking in so-called “standard Japanese” which I use in Tokyo. When I was young, my mother taught me how to talk in the standard Japanese, since she was not a person born in Osaka. Since Osaka dialect was thought to be a “dirty” dialect (This word “dirty” simply means that it is very different from the standard Japanese accent), my mother liked to tell us that there is an alternative in speaking in Japanese, seriously….. Of course, this standard Japanese can be available on TV. But it is in fact important to practive communication in the standard Japanese somehow. In this way, I tell my friends that I am a “bilingual.” But I am not sure how accurate my standard Japanese is.
In any case, I could deliver my lectures in Osaka dialect, and I enjoyed it a lot. People in Osaka university, including graduate students, are very active and I enjoyed discussions with them. Hopefully they have got some sense of D-branes and their solitonic expressions, which are the main subject of the lectures.
