Fangirl Japanese

[moonwise]

For the past week, I have been in Six Sigma/Green Belt training, which is a problem-solving/quality assurance type thing that is often used at large corporations. Training is something akin to hitting yourself in the head with a brick repeatedly.

In any case, a lot of the principles were imported from Japan. So, I am finding that the phenomenon of fangirl Japanese is rampant: we go to genba to find our muda, and have hansei at the end of our Kaizen event (all this is pronounced wrong, of course; Kaizen comes out "Kaizaaan," and hansei comes out "hansaaaaiiii".) There is also something called poka-yoke (let me show you it?) which I can not believe is a word in any language.

I keep wanting to ask our teacher Jill if Jill-chan is feeling very genki today, and would she then reply "Nani?"

Just shoot me and get this over with.

Comments

[arafel.livejournal.com]

Well, that's good to know that poka-yoke is a real word. I agree with what you're saying in that for terms that are translatable, why not just translate them? Genba more or less means "work floor," so say "work floor!" It's like people who say "wordsmith" instead of "edit."

(are you utilizing your proactivity matrix today? Well, I'd love to actualize that, but I've got a best practices meeting and I'm not sure about my availability... could you bottom line it for me? etc)

I'm torn between laughing and screaming at how familiar that sounds to me. Ah, corporate America.

[arafel.livejournal.com]

Tomorrow we get even moar Japanese words, thanks to the "5S" thing. Geesh.