Can those of you who speak Japanese provide accurate, colloquial, and pithy versions of the following sentences? I could guess at how to say some of it, but I think the combination of "learned from a textbook" and "grammatically mangled" tends to confuse people.
1. "We create manga/comic books. She draws, I write."
2. "I am a writer." (I don't know why this was so hard to convey, but I've tried various words that supposedly mean "professional writer" in Japanese, and nine times out of ten people had no idea what I meant.)
3. "I did not vote for George Bush."
4. "We work for/at the Jim Henson Company. I am a writer. She is a puppeteer. She is in charge of/President of children's TV."
5. "She is a college/university librarian."
6. Hmm. What else should I be able to say that's not in the usual tourist lexicon, but is likely to come up in conversation? (2 and 3 actually have come up, repeatedly.)
1. "We create manga/comic books. She draws, I write."
2. "I am a writer." (I don't know why this was so hard to convey, but I've tried various words that supposedly mean "professional writer" in Japanese, and nine times out of ten people had no idea what I meant.)
3. "I did not vote for George Bush."
4. "We work for/at the Jim Henson Company. I am a writer. She is a puppeteer. She is in charge of/President of children's TV."
5. "She is a college/university librarian."
6. Hmm. What else should I be able to say that's not in the usual tourist lexicon, but is likely to come up in conversation? (2 and 3 actually have come up, repeatedly.)