Here I was, thinking I was a perfectly fine and normal American studying abroad in Japan for a year. Days passed swiftly and I was having the time of my life. But little did I know I was slowly being consumed by a most debilitating disease, the kind of disease that one can only pick up while in Japan for a long time. When my parents came to Japan, they saw it right away and made the chilling diagnosis: “you sound like a llama!”

Yes, in the course of studying Japanese and speaking with Japanese friends every day, I had picked up Japanese conversational vocalizations, which are quite different from those in English. In a conversation in Japanese, it is expected that you demonstrate, audibly, that you are following along with what the other person is saying. In English, one may nod their head, or say something like “uh-huh.” In Japanese, however, it comes out something like this, which is apparently llama-esque to English speaking ears:

Photograph by Jessie Reeder. This post is a submission for the July ’09 JapanSoc Blog Matsuri.