Question – How Do You Say “Hello” on the phone in Japanese? It is not “konnichi wa” - 今日は . That is the equivalent of ‘good day’ or saying ‘hello’ to someone in person.

On the phone it is ‘moshi moshi’ - もしもし – moa like in moat and she – moa she moa she.

It is not moo (like the cow) she moo she – むしむし. I tried that once and it didn’t work.

I called a Shakey’s Pizza joint to order a pizza – “mooshee mooshee.” It was followed by laughter. 5-6 people took a turn laughing at me before I finally got my order in. When I asked my girl friend  what the problem was, she laughed at my mooshee mooshee, too. Mooshee = worm. I was saying – “Wormy, wormy, give me a pizza, please.” Then I laughed, and looked really carefully at my pizza to see what was on it.

That was 20+ years ago. Fast forward to today. It’s not a problem any more. NEC has developed speech interpretation software for mobile phones that can interpret words and phrases commonly associated with travel, quickly and accurately. “A high precision compact and scalable voice recognition engine and a lexical-rule-based translation device” are at the heart of the device.

Now when a Japanese is on a trip, they can let their telephone do the talking.

Oh, and when the guy in front of you drops something and you want to get his attention, you yell out “moshi moshi” as if you were on the phone. That’ll do the trick.

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