Saltooo...

We used to make fun of our Telugu friends about Telugu…"What ra...if you put “Lu” after any Tamil word you will get Telugu". After being in Japan for almost 5 months now, I felt the same about Japanese as well… Take any English word and add “aeiou”... whatever you feel comfortable and you will get an equivalent Japanese word…It has worked well quite a few times… “Busu” for Bus, “Milku” for “Milk”… but this was not the case yesterday. After deciding to cook yesterday, I wanted to buy some salt and vegetables… Went to a nearby shop and checked the whole shop and couldn’t find any salt…Thought its time to use my Japanese skills…

Me: Sumimasen, Saltooo…
Shopkeeper: Kohi..?
Me: (I knew Kohi means coffee and she was trying to say something about coffee and said no) Nai…Thought she didn’t get me properly and I asked for “Saltoo”(stressing the word) again…
Shopkeeper: Ryori..?
Me: (Ryori-cooking… thought she got what I said) Hai…

and bought it. When I was about to start cooking, I opened the pack to taste it and it was not salt(Good that I was not over confident in my Japanese... I checked before adding it to my cooking)… it was sugar :( ... what the ****... I had no choice but to buy Salt. So checked the English-Japanese dictionary and knew that my Jappu technique went horribly wrong this time... "Sauto" almost pronounced like 'Saltooo" means Sugar and "Shio" means Salt...

Vocabulary learnt:
Sauto - Sugar
Shio - Salt