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As a non-native English speaker, I'd be curious of how an old person would say that in English. "I'm like..." is such a convenient phrase that I can't think of
by euske 7y ago
As a non-native English speaker, I'd be curious of how an old person would say that in English. "I'm like..." is such a convenient phrase that I can't think of any other replacement that sounds equally natural and spontaneous.
As for the original Japanese phrase, I can imagine it's something along the line of "「おい、どうした」とか言って" or something like that, where "like" can be literally replaced with とか (alike, etc.) which has been a common phrase in Japanese for decades.
- azernik 7y agoOlder native English speakers usually just go with "I said", at all levels of formality. You might hear "I says" in the past tense too. The increased separation of a "natural and spontaneous" register of English seems to have been mostly a function of 1970s-1990s youth culture - you can hear this in "candid microphone" radio shows before this period [1], where there's surprisingly little difference (to a young-ish native speaker like me) between the recorded colloquial usage and the formal standard English of speeches/literature/film. Lots mid-century film sounds stilted to us, but people actually spoke like that. [1] A big chunk of recordings are at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znyNNn5esXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znyNNn5esXg
- monetus 7y agoIn my experience, most older people would be more literal: I told him/her, I said, I says (pronounced sez, informal). If it wasn't speech but another action, it would be similar. "I'm like" is probably from the 70's, so it is pretty common.