Sometimes the implied meaning of words can be very different from the stated meaning.
A friend of ours in Japan, on a recent visit to the offices of another company, asked the receptionist, {Kobayashi Hiroko, onegai shimasu{ ({Please get me Hiroko Kobayashi{), only to be told, {Shitsurei desu ga...{ ({Excuse me...{). Thinking that she hadn't been able to catch the name of the person he was looking for, he repeated himself. She laughed a little, and said {Onamae wa nan desu ka?{ ({What's your name?{).
In this case, the Japanese phrase {Shitsurei desu ga{ (literally, {it's rude, but{) implied something like {Excuse me for being so rude, but who should I say is asking for her?{ This is just one of the many situations in Japan where just being able to understand the spoken words is not enough - to communicate successfully, you have to understand the cultural background, and hear the unspoken words as well as the spoken. This is a major part of our approach at GenkiJACS (the {C{ stands for {Culture{!), and the reason we offer a cultural component to all our courses. Words alone are nearly meaningless - cultural context, it could be argued, can change everything...