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One of the first things young learners of a foreign language develop is an interest in the more colorful words of the second language they are attempting to master. In Japan, it's common for native English speakers who come over for a year-long stint as English teachers to happily cater to the wishes of teen and young adult students to gain knowledge of such words. These inexperienced young teachers believe they are enlightening their eager Japanese learners in "real world" language as opposed to the sanitized, simplified, and stiff version of English that is commonly presented in their textbooks.

Few people really stop to consider how curse words in their language are used and how ill-equipped they are to teach them to those who grow up in other cultures. The truth is that appropriate use of swearing in a language is very difficult. Teaching only the words themselves without copious instruction in "appropriate" situations in which to use them often results in (sometimes comical) misuse.

In addition to the lack of cultural context causing problems, many Japanese people are exposed to English a little too late in their educational experiences to develop an ear for sounds so they mishear words and invent their own weird phrasing for certain expressions or their own garbled words. Some of my students were convinced that "farstible" was a word. To their ears, this was what "first of all" sounded like.

In my second job in Japan, my work included correcting homework reports in which students wrote a variety of stories and I repeatedly came across one cursing phrase along these lines. Every once in awhile, students attempting to be colorful would have one of the characters in their stories exclaim, "oh my Got," in great surprise believing they were correctly taking a deity's name in vane as they'd heard so many times on television programs and in movies.

The situation with English curse words being taught to Japanese students is further complicated by the fact that there are certain sounds in English that don't exist in Japanese and must be translated into the Japanese phonetic alphabet in an awkward way in order to approximate the correct pronunciation. This approximation doesn't always work and the end result sounds strange. One example of this is the "uh" sound as in "fudge". This sound simply doesn't exist in Japanese so the closest that comes to it is either "oo" as in "food" or "agh" as in "fat".

Another part of my second job in Japan was conducting brief telephone

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