Famous Last Words

 As I walked upstairs, I remembered that it is also someone’s birthday today, the person that the Nijikaewa group will be visiting later, for a combination house warming and “friendsgiving”. 

I tried to remember the phrase in Japanese for “happy birthday” and got as far as たんじょうびおめでとう. I had a feeling that I was probably missing a particle or a helper verb to make it polite, so I thought “I’ll look it up in google translate, after all, even google translate can’t get something that simple wrong…”. I guess the title should have come with a spoiler warning, because it did. 

I typed “happy birthday” and it translated it as just たんじょうび (admittedly with the correct kanji for it and with romaji for the kanji)), but that’s just birthday. 

To force it to translate happy birthday correctly, I had to change it to “happy birthday to you” when it finally coughed forth “お誕生日おめでとう”. I had missed an honourable お. Given its poor performance on the translation of happy birthday, I’m still not sure that this is correct…

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