

I can count to ten in English (native), Japanese (did Karate for about a decade) and Spanish (took classes in middle and high school).
I can … read and listen to Spanish and maybe understand at about a 2nd or 3rd grade level… very much out of practice.
I would not say I can speak Japanese or understand it … basically at all, unless the conversation entirely consists of either counting, or using nouns describing Karate forms, lol.
The first time I dated … a combination weeabo and owns her own horses, horse girl, who was actually taking Japanese in college to major in it…
She asked me a very grammatically basic question in Japanese, a yes no question…
And I responded ‘Osu!’… and then quickly learned that that is not a standard Japanese word for ‘yes’, that would be ‘Hai’, and that Osu … basically only contextually makes sense in the context of a dojo or some other sports/military type setting.
Apparently in proper/normal? Japanese it is a casual greeting amongst martial arts practitioners… but I was literally drilled to say it as an enthusiastic, affirmative response to any command.
EDIT: Also, this will sound insane, but I swear to god this actually happened: Many years after the aforementioned clarification from my at the time gf… I later encountered a man who told me he was … a yakuza, specifically a yakushi… we chatted for hours, he showed me how one of his fingers had been severely busted at the knuckle.
He explained to me that… there had been a fuckup on his part, but his… direct superior decided to basically accept some of the blame for the fuckup of this guy I met, and struck him with the blunt side of the blade instead of the sharp side… and then exiled him.
Which was why he was in America, and could no longer safely return to Japan.
Anyway, he explained to me that the reason why… most Japanese say ‘yon’ instead of ‘shi’ to mean ‘4’ … is because ‘shi’ is also the character/sound that… basically means ‘death’.
Which then circled around to why he referred to himself as a ‘yakushi’.
As he explained it to me, it meant that he had both dealt, and been sparred from death.
… I have no idea if what this guy was saying is actually true, if he actually was a yakuza… but he did tell me these things and seemed very serious about them.
Because it was generated by an LLM that assumes this one to ten iteration function is the entirety of all of what the code needs to do.