Hi again. Niko here.

This week’s prompt

You’re the new person at work. Your senpai just asked what sort of extracurricular activities you did back in high school.

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Last week’s corrections

You’re chatting with the new guy at work. You want to ask him what sort of extracurricular activities he did back in high school.

These culture-heavy situations tend to throw me off a lot, as it’s so tempting to start wondering “Extracurricular activity? What is that even called in Japanese? How does the system for this even work in Japan?”

And if you don’t know that system, well, it seems kind of difficult to have a conversation about it.

Anyway, for this one I might have said:

高校んとき部活かなんかやってた？
こうこう　ん　とき　ぶかつ　か　なんか　やってた？
Were you in any clubs or anything in high school?

Well, what I originally came up with was this sentence minus the かなんか part, and that would have been fine, too. But then Rei suggested adding かなんか, which I thought was a nice touch, as it sounds less direct, much like the nuance added by that “or anything” in English.

I intentionally wrote ん instead of の since during the last few years, I’ve been trying to remind myself to say んとき instead of のとき to make my casual speech sound more like that of a native speaker. When writing, it would be more common to put の, however.

(On a side note, translating 部活 (ぶかつ) as “club activities” or whatever always irks me because 部活 includes sports, but you have sports “teams”, not “clubs” where I went to high school.)

Here is Satoko with everyone’s feedback: