Lesson 10: Real Emergencies

In this lesson

Lesson 9 closed the grammar — twenty frames, and everything after is vocabulary. This is the one exception you hope never to open: no new frames, just the words for the worst day. Everything here is built from frames you already own — X onegaishimasu, X ga arimasu, X wa doko desu ka, an adjective plus desu — so there is nothing new to parse, only new nouns to keep on a card in your wallet.

By the end of this lesson you can:

• call for help, and get an ambulance or the police,
• catch the one question every emergency call opens with — and answer it,
• catch Dou shimashita ka — the what’s-wrong question anyone helping you opens with — and answer it too,
• say you’re hurt — and how badly,
• find the nearest embassy or evacuation shelter,
• say you have insurance at a hospital desk,
• and recognize an earthquake or tsunami alert for what it is, without needing to translate a word.

As always: tap each sentence and listen first, repeat it aloud, then check yourself against the text and meaning that appear. Tap again to listen as often as you like. Drill this lesson cold, hope you never need it, and be grateful it’s there if you do.

Warm-up

Before anything else, clear your Anki reviews — the deck is the real warm-up; the remix below just gets you moving.

Remix

Lesson 8’s problem kit, recombined. Listen cold first.

Every one of those is Lesson 8 material. Today it goes up a gear.

Calling for help

The cry itself you’ve owned since Lesson 1: Tasukete! — shouted, it turns every head on the street, and there’s no time for a polite sentence when you need it. What it can’t do is tell anyone what you need. These can:

Dial either number and the first voice asks the same kind of question — which service do you need? Both openers are waiting in “What they’ll say to you” below; drill them there, and the real call holds no surprise in its first three seconds.

Saying what’s wrong

Getting to safety

Dialog

A fall on the street, and a stranger who stops. Everything the traveler says is a frame he already owned — the emergency is all vocabulary. Listen to the whole dialog cold first.

Read the traveler’s side: a cry, an injury report, a want answered hai, an insurance line, a thank-you — every one a shape you’ve owned for lessons. The vocabulary was new; the grammar never was.

What they’ll say to you

First, the phone. Dial 119 or 110 and the call opens the same way: one question, offering you a choice of exactly two words. It’s Lesson 6’s choice enumeration pointed back at you — and every answer either question wants is already in this lesson.

Catch the word you own — kaji, the kyuukyuu at the front of kyuukyuusha, jiko — and answer with the thing you need: Kyuukyuusha, onegaishimasu! or Kaji desu! on 119, Jiko desu. on 110. (Jiken — a crime — is the one word here you don’t own; for that call, name the problem the Lesson 8 way: Kaban ga arimasen.) After that, the operator wants where — and this is the one moment your pointing finger fails you. Say Eigo, onegaishimasu — an interpreter can usually join the call (behavior notes below) — or hand the phone to anyone nearby. Failing both, give what you have: a romaji address if one’s on your screen, otherwise the name of wherever you are — the shop, the station, the big landmark across the street. A named place beats a perfect address for somewhere you aren’t.

Next, the loudspeakers. Two alerts you will only ever hear — from a loudspeaker, a train PA, or your own phone screaming its emergency tone. Don’t translate them; catch the one word that names the danger — jishin (earthquake), or tsunami, which sounds almost exactly like the English word Japanese gave us, so it’s the one you’ll catch for free — and do what everyone around you does. The screen carries the details — a map, the district, the wave height — exactly as it does with train times. And if your phone’s language is set to English, the emergency alert itself (the area mail that makes it scream) often arrives already translated: the same warning in words you can read.

You never say these — they’re for your ears. The verbs in them (ochitsuite, mamotte, nigete) are outside your kit on purpose; you only need to recognize the danger word and move.

Repair drill

At a hospital reception, the reply comes back in full keigo about forms and cards. You are not expected to parse it. Deploy the kit; the paper does the rest.

Asked for easy Japanese, the request collapsed to nouns you own plus onegaishimasu — hokenshou became hoken, the ID request became pasupooto. You had both in your bag the whole time. Note which rung did it: slower wouldn’t have translated mibunshoumeisho for you; simpler did.

Graduation: the two hardest conversations, again

Two scenes earlier in this course were built to be over your head. Lesson 1 sent you into a clinic on Day 1, when you owned twenty-two chunks and nothing else; Lesson 8 sent you to a kouban with a lost passport. Both times the promise was the same: come back at the end. This is the end. Listen again — every word of both is now yours.

First, the clinic:

On Day 1 you caught almost nothing here. Now, line by line: hoken — insurance — is this lesson’s word; omochi desu ka is the konbini’s polite “do you have?” from Lesson 3’s point-card question; plain arimasu ka is Lesson 4; that trailing Eigo wa chotto… is Lesson 9’s polite no; and both of the traveler’s phone moves are Lesson 1’s own kit. Nothing in the scene sits outside the course. The wall you hit on Day 1 wasn’t a wall — just words that hadn’t arrived yet.

And the kouban, from Lesson 8:

The officer’s side, fully unlocked: Dou shimashita ka is the what’s-wrong opener you just drilled; then taishikan (this lesson’s word), eki no mae (the station’s front — Lesson 6’s mae), massugu, tsukiatari, hidari (Lesson 6’s direction set), go-fun (the spoken minutes your ear has been trained to catch), chotto matte kudasai (Lesson 7), ja, koko desu (Lesson 4). You now understand everything the officer said. But look again at the slip in your hand: you still can’t read what she wrote — and that is exactly why the phone, not the pen, is the ladder’s last rung.

That’s the graduation measure. This course never promised you’d stop needing the repair kit — it promised the kit would always be enough. It was enough on Day 1, when you understood nothing; it’s enough now, when you understand everything said to you in these two scenes; and it will be enough in Japan, where the truth lives somewhere in between.

How to behave: when it’s serious

• Know the two numbers, and which is which. 119 is fire and ambulance; 110 is police. For a medical emergency or a fire, 119; for a crime or an accident with the authorities, 110. The call opens with the operator’s two-word choice (the script above) — answer with the thing you need, and dispatch has started.
• On the phone: say Eigo, onegaishimasu — and don’t hang up. Dispatch centers across most of Japan — all the big cities and tourist areas — can conference a telephone interpreter into the call: a short pause, then a third voice speaking English. The pause is the system working, not a dead end. (Rural centers may be Japanese-only; handing the phone to anyone nearby is the fastest move everywhere.) For “where”: urban dispatchers can usually trace a mobile call roughly, but don’t lean on it — give what you actually have: a romaji address if one’s on your screen, otherwise the name of the place you’re at or the nearest landmark — the station, the konbini chain, the intersection signs (city ones often carry romaji).
• Kouban for small, 119/110 for serious. The neighborhood kouban (Lesson 8) is for directions, lost items, and minor trouble — walk in freely. It is not the number you call when someone collapses. Match the door to the size of the problem.
• In an earthquake: drop, cover, hold on — indoors. Get under a sturdy table, cover your head, and wait out the shaking; don’t run outside mid-quake (falling glass and signage hurt more people than buildings do). When it stops, follow the posted signs to the nearest hinanjo.
• The disruption you’re most likely to actually meet is a typhoon (June through October) — and it comes with a full day’s warning and announcements of its own: Japan stops its trains before the storm and says so in advance. That layer — the planned suspension, the mid-storm stop, the hotel-day strategy — lives in the Weather & Typhoon booster.
• Do the safety paperwork before you land. Buy travel insurance that covers medical evacuation, and register your trip with your country’s embassy if it offers it. Keep your insurance number and the embassy’s address saved offline — the worst day is not the day to be searching for them.

Checkpoint

Your exit exam, out loud. Each line below sets a scene from this lesson — say the Japanese before you tap; the tap plays the answer. Check yourself, repeat after the audio matching its pronunciation, rhythm, and speed, and if one won’t come, replay its section. These are this deck’s speaking cards — in Anki they queue up after the listening cards, so you’ll always have heard a line before you’re asked to produce it.

This is the one lesson worth over-drilling for a day you’ll probably never have.

Still on the checklist — ears and behavior, with no card to grade you:

• the earthquake and tsunami alerts — and that they mean move, not translate? (the script section)

Vocabulary reference

Recognize only — never say these. The operators’ openers, the helper’s what’s-wrong question, and the disaster alerts, for your ears exclusively:

Anki deck

Drill this lesson’s audio anywhere: download the Lesson 10 Anki deck. Sentence cards are the course; vocab cards are backup — suspend them unless a word won’t stick.

And that’s the whole course: eleven lessons, twenty frames, ~300 items — and not one rude sentence possible. From here, growth is pure vocabulary: harvest nouns in the field with Kore wa nihongo de nan desu ka and Itte kudasai, and add a themed booster when a trip calls for one. When you need a sentence the lessons never taught, the AI translator will assemble it from pieces you own — and when the survival kit itself stops being enough, Beyond MiniCore maps the road onward. Ja, mata.