Book Review: KY式日本語

I'm always looking for ways to make my Japanese studies more fun, and therefore easy to remember. My latest endeavor is trying to read The Spiderwick Chronicles entirely in Japanese. Since it's probably the kind of book older elementary school students are reading, so far I've been doing okay.

When I went to the bookstore to pick up the first volume, I came across another interesting looking book.
This one:
Forgive the blatant borrowing of the picture from Amazon.jp, but it's a direct link to the page too, so click away.

Most of you have heard the term KY. It's a 略語,　an abbreviation or acronym, and it stands for 空気読めない、 meaning someone who's socially awkward (literally: they can't read the air). I first heard this a while ago, and while I thought it sounded like the sort of silly thing a 笑い芸の人 would think up as a gimmick, it did help me learn a new phrase. I started to hear more from my students. PK was パンツ食い込んでいる, used to describe someone chubby (or someone who just happens to be wearing too tight underwear, the elastic "eating into" their waist). JK was 女子高生, which made JK nanpa (the act of trying to pick up high school girls), a very dangerous phrase for a teacher to repeat, even when he's just trying to ascertain the meaning. Whoops.

While I have yet to power through the full introduction, I get the sense that this book supports the inclusion of these kinds of 略語, a number of which have made it into the new edition of Japanese dictionaries this year. The bulk of it is made up of hundreds of other abbreviations, some in use now, some that it either suggests or imagines might be popularly used in the future.

• FK abbreviates the already abbrieviated ファンデコイ, which means your ファンデ　(foundation, as in make-up) is 濃い (too strong, as in flavors, smells, or make-up applications).
• HT means 話ついて行けない. Someone who can't follow a conversation.
• And the RIDICULOUS "I"T means 'I'す食べたい。　アイス食べたい。 Gurrrrooooan.

I recommend it. I recommend carrying it around and showing it to your Japanese friends. It will produce some GREAT conversations about Japanese phrases, a lot of laughing, and a lot of head shaking followed by "日本人はそのこと言わない。" And it'll put a lot of new things in your head, which is really what it's all about.