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I stumbled on this site yesterday. It seems to have examples of various dialects and how they differ from Standard. Can anyone confirm this?

Looks like part of a town website for [kana]tsugumura[/kana], a town next to Toyota City. The top equates [kana]tsuguben[/kana] with [kana]mikawaben[/kana], which is the dialect spoken south of Nagoya in Aichi-ken, around Mikawa Bay. I can't speak it, though I've met people who do (and they kindly switched for me!)

The big text bits offer some linguistic history, and the ABCs (a,ka,sa's) lists ways the -ben differs then from regular speech. The rest of the site is school info, town info etc.

Is that what you're asking?

Ahhh, so the a, ka, sa's are for that specific area... I thought they covered more dialects than the local one. This site had popped up in Google after searching for an oddball phrase and was hoping I could use it as a reference for later.

Cheers.

This seems to be a pretty good dialect site:
http://hougen.atok.com/

Click the red dot on the map for the prefecture you want, then in the データベースへGO！ section, click 集まった言葉を見る

yes lets learn dialects before we know japanese well, surely a good investment of time

What makes you think nobody here knows Japanese well?

im sorry i should have said i think learning a dialect itself is an utter waste regardless of how good someone is in japanese.
i think this becouse well, i never bothered to learn the dialects of mine own country so its seems even more pointless to learnt those of another..

ivoSF: For what it's worth, I'm not trying to learn a specific dialect other than standard. It's just that when I come across a sentence with some odd construction and I'm like "uhhh, what?" a resource that shows common changes between dialects would be useful.

sorry if i was a nag, i understand

For what it's worth, Japan is a dialect-rich country, and it helps immensely to know the local language. Kansai-ben is the biggest, and you find it in books & movies all the time. Most comedians come from Osaka, for instance. Even the Kansai-ben areas of Kobe, Osaka, & Kyoto all three have local variations. Do you have to know them? Not necessarily, but it can sure get you in with the locals a lot faster.

billyclyde Wrote:For what it's worth, Japan is a dialect-rich country, and it helps immensely to know the local language. Kansai-ben is the biggest, and you find it in books & movies all the time. Most comedians come from Osaka, for instance. Even the Kansai-ben areas of Kobe, Osaka, & Kyoto all three have local variations. Do you have to know them? Not necessarily, but it can sure get you in with the locals a lot faster.

More likely they'll just laugh because they can't believe a foreigner is speaking the local dialect - It'll seem incredibly odd to them (with the possible exception of Osakaben due to the number of foreigners there compared to say Aomori).

Even if you want to learn the dialects for whatever reason, do NOT learn from a website or book, they are full of incredibly outdated slang etc (for example, no one in the Kansai area actually says "Moukarimakka?", but it's the first thing you'll see on anything trying to teach Osakaben). You'll end up sounding like a hybrid oyajii/obaasan/airheaded teenage schoolgirl. If you must learn the dialect, learn it by hanging out with people your own age and gender who speak it (which of course isn't possible for everyone).

Also, after you learn the dialect, do NOT use it where it's not appropriate, such as with people who do not speak the dialect, or in meshita/meue and uchi/soto situations. (polite) Japanese people don't do it and neither should you. It gives off the image of being an uneducated country bumpkin (which is ironic since you'd have to spend extra effort to learn the dialect on top of the standard).

In short, I'd recommend only learning passive recognition of your local dialect (as well as major dialects such as Osakaben), and not even bother trying to speak them.

@ivoSF

Dialects in Japan may function differently from the way they do in your home country. I know it's a very different situation from American dialects. If I didn't understand a Japanese dialect, I wouldn't be able to understand the people around me, including my girlfriend. And speaking with dialectical features from time to time can be quite enjoyable.

References like the one above can be useful for finding out the normal Japanese equivalent of an expression you've encountered, but should not be used for picking up new vocabulary you've never heard before.

Jarvik7 Wrote:More likely they'll just laugh because they can't believe a foreigner is speaking the local dialect ... If you must learn the dialect, learn it by hanging out with people your own age and gender who speak it ... do NOT use it where it's not appropriate... It gives off the image of being an uneducated country bumpkin

Certainly good advice, esp. the situational stuff. Start polite until you know the rules. But I think our experiences have been different: the teachers where I worked would slip into their -ben at the drop of a hat, and I disagree that they'll just laugh if you try. No more than laughing at hearing a foreigner speak Japanese, which has been 50/50 for me, and based on a couple of friends who have spent a lot of time living in the local language (the one who told me all about Mikawa-ben, for instance). I always got a lot of traction from trying the stuff out, if I can't remember much.

However, those were situations where they lived & worked in a community, not someone just off the boat with "Making Out in Obaasan" tucked in the bookbag.

That said, I think for anything outside Kansai, it would be really hard to find a good guide that gets past the basics. Even [kana]bochi bochi[/kana] you can read about, but finding out how it's really used you can only get by feel.