How do I handle misunderstandings during Japanese phone calls

To handle misunderstandings during Japanese phone calls effectively, the key strategies include:

1. Speaking clearly and slowly, avoiding ambiguous expressions.
2. Using polite language and expressions to maintain harmony.
3. Actively confirming and clarifying by repeating or paraphrasing to ensure mutual understanding. Common Japanese phrases for clarification include:
   • “すみません、もう一度言っていただけますか？” (“Excuse me, can you say that again?”)
   • “○○という意味ですか？” (“Do you mean ○○?”)
   • “念のため、確認させてください” (“Just to confirm, let me check”)
4. Using back-channel responses such as “はい” (“Yes”), “そうですか” (“I see”), or “わかりました” (“Understood”) to show active listening.
5. Politely asking for repetition or clarification if something is unclear instead of guessing or pretending to understand.

Japanese phone etiquette emphasizes maintaining smooth, respectful communication, so handling misunderstandings carefully and politely is crucial. ^{1, 2, 3}

References

• CALLS: Japanese Empathetic Dialogue Speech Corpus of Complaint Handling and Attentive Listening in Customer Center

• Backchannel as a Listener’s Consideration Behavior: Politeness Strategy of Japanese Native Speakers in Interaction

• LANGUAGE ADJUSTMENT ON A CONTACT SITUATIONS BETWEEN NATIVE SPEAKERS AND ADVANCED JAPANESE LEARNERS: A COMPARISON WITH NATIVE SPEAKERS SITUATIONS (母語話者と上級日本語学習者の接続場面における言語調整：母語場面との比較)

• STUDENTS’ ENGLISH VOWEL PRONUNCIATION IN HANDLING PHONE CALLS

• Long-term recall accuracy for mobile phone calls in young Japanese people: A follow-up validation study using software-modified phones

• Recall accuracy of mobile phone calls among Japanese young people

• Communication Strategy in Handling Land Boundary Disputes at the Land Office of Lhokseumawe City

• Mobile Phone Use During Class at a Japanese Women’s College

• When the Words are Not Everything: The Use of Laughter, Fillers, Back-Channel, Silence, and Overlapping Speech in Phone Calls

• The Relationship between a Night Usage of Mobile Phone and Sleep Habit and the Circadian Typology of Japanese Students Aged 18 - 30 yrs

• ‘Eyes free’ in-car assistance: parent and child passenger collaboration during phone calls

• The trajectory of repairs in the defibrillator sequence during emergency cardiac arrest calls - Balancing progressivity and intersubjectivity.

• CALLS: Japanese Empathetic Dialogue Speech Corpus of Complaint Handling and Attentive Listening in Customer Center

• Chat Translation Error Detection for Assisting Cross-lingual Communications

• An Investigation of Warning Erroneous Chat Translations in Cross-lingual Communication

• Errors in Learning Japanese through Listening-Misheard Cases-

• A Kinetic Approach to Understanding Communication and Context in Japanese

• Coimagining the Future of Voice Assistants with Cultural Sensitivity

• Discourse Structure Analysis of Making Request in Japanese Conversation

• A corpus-assisted analysis of indexical signs for (im)politeness in Japanese apology-like behaviour

• Coimagining the Future of Voice Assistants with Cultural Sensitivity

• Interlanguage Pragmatics Failure among Javanese Learners of Japanese

• Nonverbal Codes in Interpersonal Communication Between Genders of Japanese Native Speakers