Mikawa-ben?

[EvilCowSlayer]

So I'm going to Japan in March on an exchange program. I just found out where I'll be going, and it looks like I'll be speaking Mikawa-ben. Wikipedia has next to no information on the dialect, and Google isn't helping much either. Does anyone know any resources that I could use to learn Mikawa-ben? Thanks.

[nice gaijin]

I did a search and found this site, which has a list of words in Mikawa-ben, their counterparts in standard Japanese, example sentences and even a rating for how often each word is used. Just click the links at the top of the page (they're organized by the sound they start with)

http://homepage.mac.com/ayustatim/mikawa-ben.html

This may give you an idea of the kind of words you're going to run into, but you're going to pick up so much more once you start talking to native speakers. Just practice repeating what they say and asking what it means.

[Mikawa Ossan]

Mikawa dialect is pretty similar to standard Japanese.

The most important difference in my opinion is the word だら which is the same as だろう in standard Japanese. There are other words that are used only in Mikawa, but this by far the most common one.

[EvilCowSlayer]

Thanks for all the help, guys.

Are there any different verb endings that I should know about?

[NattyBumppo]

Odds are most of the people around you will speak to you in standard Japanese (Tokyo dialect), and you might have to ask people to speak to you in Mikawa-ben if you want to hear it a lot. Anyway, I wouldn't be too worried about absolutely having to learn the dialect before you go, but I'd certainly be excited about the opportunity to learn a new dialect of Japanese.