And as Penny pointed out a book or two ago, saying "I do not speak your language" too well, with good grammar and pronunciation, sets up a cognitive dissonance. It is actually recommended in Japan to say, "So-ri, I do no-to su-pi-ko ja-pa-ni-su."
Which leads me back to what I didn't want to do in the current book. Sigh. I'm writing a world adventure series but my protagonist doesn't speak any of the local languages. That gives me nothing but awkward choices;
She can have no conversations with the locals at all. Nothing of culture, no character interactions.
She can speak in halting pidgin. Besides dragging down the pace of the story, besides taking the more nuanced observations of society off the table (it's a bit to say "We belong to a socio-anarchist collective" in pidgin), it also risks filling the book with Funny Foreigners. That is...all the locals look like idiots because they can't speak correctly.
She can mysteriously run into fluent English speakers everywhere, and in regards to the funny foreigner problem above, nobody takes notice of it (because "You speak English well for a backwards tribesman" is not the way to go.)
And what really kills me is that Japanese is such an seemingly accessible language. The pronunciation appears regular (hint -- it actually isn't), the grammatical rules are exposed (and are a lot more difficult than they appear at first glance), etc.
Take the title above. If you know the "hello and thank you" words then you already know "sumimasen" is "I'm sorry." And you might remember "Nihon" is how you say "Japan" in Japanese, and that it like several nouns appears in noun-compounds; such as "Nihonjin" for "Japanese person." And lastly, if you have delved at all into grammar you know the "su" endings are "is" and the "masen" endings are "is not."
And that means you can reconstruct this as "Sorry, Japan-thing verb-isn't." Doesn't take much guesswork after that to make out Nihon-go is Japanese language, and Wakari is "To understand."
Ah, but understanding why the particle is "ga" and not "wa"...?
Eventually I'm going to send her to Central America and there her High School Spanish will mean she can converse near-normally. Except for all those intriguing little differences between dialects and idioms (as quoted in The Fruit Palace, "Does red make you fight?")
Next up, though, is Paris, and the running gag in that one is going to be the seeming failure of Penny's magical mimetic ability. No matter what she says, the Parisians will correct her.
***
On another front -- and I almost started with this instead -- I've found myself writing historical fiction. When I did the Athens book I was extremely careful about describing actual places correctly for the would-be traveler. I didn't want to give bad travel advice, so if I said there was a train from so-and-so, then I made damn sure you really can catch a train there.
I was a little less careful about the London book but I still added a back-page disclaimer that some of the things I portrayed were out of date or modified for the purpose of the story. But here too, I was being careful.
I'm still being careful in the Kyoto book, but something has happened in the meanwhile. The world is changing. It is probably happening a lot less in Japan, but right now, I am feeling more and more that what I am writing about, in stories set in 2018 and 2019, is a vanished world. My reader is no more going to be able to follow exactly in the footsteps of Penny Bright in the London of 2018, than they would be able to go and do what Linnet did in the 1940's diary Penny discovered in the Underground.
January is going to be a tough month. February might be too. I think it might be March before we see a light at the end of the tunnel -- and find out if it is daylight or an oncoming train.
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