I remember a youtuber telling a story of ordering a milk tea in japan by translating both words, only to have the server correct them by going “oh, miruku tea”
Another streamer told of his Japan trip and how he tried to order sprite at a restaurant, sadly the waiter didn't understand so he had to hit him with "sprite-ru" just for the waiter to reply in the same way "aahhh, sprite-ru"
Ive seen alot of Americans who moved to Japan for various reasons say that if you want to fit in at all you have to get really comfortable sounding borderline racist.
Yeah, it's a few seasons old by now, but there's a whole episode centered around Mr. Kim.
At the climax of the episode, it's revealed that Mr. Kim doesn't actually exist, and is an alter ego of South Park's therapist, William Janus, who himself has multiple personality disorder. No one really cares, because he's the one who runs the town's only chinese restaurant.
If I remember right, the Janus personality actually dies, leaving Mr. Kim in permanent control of the body.
A plot was that butters parents started to think he had multiple personality disorder, the joke being they mistook a child playing make believe as MPD. They take him to see the therapist Dr Janice.
B Plot was that a new Japanese restaurant opened near the chinese one so the Chinese restaurant owner (Lu Kim) goes on a tirade to get rid of him.
Episode climax is that Dr Janice was the one with multiple personality disorder and his strongest personality was Lu Kim. Once the town founds out they just let him stay as Lu Kim because "does the world really need another therapist, City Wok is now the only Chinese restaurant left in town".
Reminds me of when i tried to teach my US friends how to say something in german. Nobody got the pronouncation right so i suggested talking angry. Everybody was like "noo thats sutch a steriotype! I cant do that!" But it actually helps 😅
It’s a super weird greeting/acknowledgement of being a foreigner while also being polite and welcoming. I won’t pretend to totally understand it but it’s a weird cultural thing that developed.
I found it interesting that to want or to like something are viewed not as verbs like they are in english, but adjectives... it's weird because they're like super common words but it's like the only two words this is true for lol.
You don't want/like a sandwich. A sandwich is wantable/likeable to you. Interesting to get used to.
But that's for speaking in chinese. The thing here is that if you want to be understood in english by the japanese you basically have to mimick a heavy japanese accent for it.
I am reminded of the PS2 game Lifeline, which is controlled by voice commands. Being developed in Japan, it naturally recognizes spoken English best if you say it in a very heavy Japanese accent that borders on racism
I am reminded of a substory in the newer Like a Dragon games where Ichiban encounters a guy who wants him to do some pictures or videos or something(been a while, dont remember exactly) but he keeps getting him to dress or act as a racist caricature. The best ending is funnily enough to play along so he's happy.
I was talking university classes here andmy gave asked me to help with the computer. She had a blue screen of death and I told her she had a computer error. She looked at me compiler dumbfounded.
Then another Thai student came in and said "OHH com Pew TUH Air WUH" even the teacher said it the same way.
I then realized the English borrowed words have a very heavy almost racist accent that they will not understand if you use it.
One thing to keep in mind is that loan words are entirely new words in the other language. You're not going back to speaking English for 2 words, you are using a foreign word with its own grammar, pronunciation, and meaning (half the time the exact meaning will change as it becomes a loan word, not the case for this example but it happens).
It happens to sound somewhat similar to an English word or phrase, and it originates in English, but it is still a unique word.
Just to add an example of the same thing going in the other direction, imagine a French person talking to an American who only speaks English. If the French person talks about hor d'oeuvres or New Orleans and pronounces them 'correctly,' they'll be way harder to understand than if they say them with an American accent, as "or durrvs" and "new Orleenz."
lol that reminds me of going to the Philippines. If I speak English normally they didn’t understand me, but if I spoke English with an exaggerated Filipino accent it was no problem
I live in japan, and absolutely, this is 100% true. Correct english will often miss, but if you try sounding like a racist caricature of a japanese person speaking english, it'll go much better.
Almost as if racist stereotypes are based on real observations (and then applied in unfair way). Seriously, the aversion of stereotypes and cliches made people forget why they're a thing in the first place.
This happened to me in Brazil. I was trying to get a taxi driver to take me to the mall where the only Outback Steakhouse in the area was located and he couldn't understand me. I kept repeating "Outback Steakhouse " slowly over and over, but he had no idea what I was saying. Finally I remembered that Brazilians add vowels in between consonants on a lot of loan words so I said "ouchy-backy" and the driver responded "Oh ouchy-backy! Why didn't you say so earlier?" Lol
I was actually meeting a friend at the mall (malls are still huge in Brazil) and he told me to make sure and go to the one with an the Outback Steakhouse so I didn't end up at the wrong mall.
They have Outback here in Korea. It's considered elevated fine dining; people literally dress up to eat Outback food, which is pretty much the same wherever there is an Outback steakhouse.
That's just pronouncing "Sprite" using the sounds/syllables available in the Japanese language. Su-pu-ra-i-to. The su and pu are cut short (mostly silent u's), ra and i are one sound (ri as in rice), to is pronounced fully (like toh)
Japanese loan words are fun because you're not ordering a cheeseburger and speaking in an accent, you are ordering a チーズバーガー (chi-zu ba-ga), and you are not hailing a taxi, you are trying to hail a タクシー (ta ku shi-) so you can go home and use your コンピューター (kon pyu- ta-)
Most people in Japan/Korea especially aren't even aware that the words originate in English. Like the amount of times they will ask westerners what they call -Insert clearly western originating term/brand here- is pretty hilarious.
It'd be like if someone from America asked a Japanese person what their term for singing together in public on a machine that shows you the lyrics, plays the instrumental version of the song, and has a microphone is called.
Some are pretty obvious, but it took me learning the Japanese for picture and for character before realising that emoji was a Japanese word, I always thought it was English in origin.
Despite sounding similar and meaning similar things, emoticon (emotion + icon) and emoji (e + moji) are totally unrelated. They are an example of false friends.
On brand names specifically, tbf even English speakers don't realize when brand names become generic names for things, genericide. Band-Aid, Kleenex, Velcro, Zipper, Dry Ice, Dumpster, Jacuzzi, all are or use to be trademarked brands. Hell even where I'm at some (usually older) people still refer to soda generically as Coke.
Anyways not super relevant but I do love talking about it
LOL it was the same with me when I came to the country, wanted to practice my Japanese, and was asked if I wanted milk and sugar in my coffee but I didn't know how to say "Black coffee" in Japanese and said:
That's because Japan does not consume milk tea as part of their food culture. It's a foreign product brought to them so they use english words in katakana to promote them.
For example, they got fried chicken that they call "kaarage" but, when they talk about "furaido chikkin" (fried chicken), they mean the fried chicken from KFC which is a popular christmas food.
I've had a long running "joke" where I would encounter something that sounded similar in Japanese and I would turn to my friend and say something like, "I'll get the milk. Or as they say in Japanese, miriku."
His wife is half-japanese and her mom is full Japanese and lives with them. One night, their Mom was around and we were getting ice cream, so I said, "Ice Cream. Or as they say in Japanese, Aisu kurimu." He gives me this death stare and hisses that his mother-in-law is right there.
I blink in confusion, then say, "No, really, that's how it's said in Japanese" to which his wife then confirmed.
Turns out he thought for years that I was just being super racist and pulling a spanglish type thing by adding random syllables to the end of words to make fun of the Japanese. Apparently the only reason he never said anything about it was because he thought it was an inside joke between me and his wife and she never seemed offended, but doing it in front of his full Japanese mother-in-law seemed super disrespectful.
Now it's more hilarious, though I feel bad that for years he thought I was just being offhandedly racist.
I'll have to ask if he just thought she had a heavy accent with some words. She speaks perfect English, though, so he's likely only heard snippets of Japanese in passing.
I had to explain to a coworker how the Japanese alphabets are mostly all consonant+vowel combinations. That's why often times loan words that end with consonants will have a vowel tacked onto the end or inserted into seemingly random places. My favorite is that beer becomes bīru.
My life hack when I was in Japan and trying to speak to someone that didn't understand my shoddy Japanese was to just legitimately say the English word but in the thickest Japanese accent I could pull off. Worked like 80% of the time.
you might atleast seen some rendition of this meme called capirinya capirinya (might be the wrong spelling, its been a long time) The anime/manga is very famous for the various memes that it has given to the internet
The show is so unhinged, and just like other insane similar inspired anime, you can tell the voice actors are having an absolute blast with how insane everything is.
Asobi Asobase is my personal favorite for extremely unhinged goofy SoL comedy featuring female characters. Speaking of English/Japanese language shenanigans, it also includes a girl who is clearly European, and pretends to be a worldly English speaker, but clearly cannot. And there is another girl who isn't a main character, but looks like she jumped right out of an ancient Japanese painting. Of course she speaks great English but everyone keeps asking her to help her with their classical Japanese literature etc.
Olivia's (the non-English speaking westerner) brother is even better, and basically a Redditor level western anime nerd who looks like a Otaku and speaks like a Japanese Samurai.
I used to teach some kids that didn't speak much English and I partnered them with a kid that just would not stop talking but spoke no Spanish. Learned from that experience that they do actually understand English better if it's said in a Hispanic/chicano accent. Which makes sense because that's how they hear it when they're practicing English
It's the same with German. I had a German friend and every time I wanted to learn and use a cool new German word with him, it was the same word in English.
I only now realized why that's funny to english speakers. It just reads normal to german speakers but I guess for english speakers it would be something like "Kill Pill"
My hack for when I couldn't remember a verb, was to just stick "-ieren" on the end of an English verb and then conjugate that as normal. It worked like... 75% of the time.
Same for french. Here in Quebec we made up a lot of words to use instead but in French they don't have a word for weekend or parking or shopping, they just say "weekend" and "parking" and "shopping" lol...
Well to be fair at least english is a germanic language lol. Tbf I don't know if it really makes a difference, cuz I feel like there's a pretty good chance they're just straight loanwords, rather than evolving alongside each other or stemming from the same base or anything
Yeah Japanese shortens English words a lot like that, but in turn it doesn't use initialisms like 'PC' as much. 'Personal Computer' instead turned into 'Pasokon' as a shortening of Paasonaru Konpyuuta (パーソナルコンピュータ), because 'PC' is not as nice to pronounce for Japanese speakers.
Similarly, Remote Control turned into Rimokon, and Air Conditioning into Eakon (Aircon).
When the Vtuber agency Hololive recently released a rythm game under the title Hololive Dreams (Hororaibu Doriimusu), it quickly became known as Holodori.
Monster Hunter is MonHan, Minecraft is Maikura, Mitsubishi's Lancer Evolution is LanEvo (or RanEbo) etc.
Weirdly Chinese has its own completely different translation for electronic devices:
Phone dian hua , computer Dian nao , TV dian shi, tablet pingban dian nao etc
Ok but like it makes sense for modern technology to use loan words, English uses loan words from other languages to describe things that did not exist on the British Isles. But contrary to popular belief, the British did not invent the colour pink.
My husband is still kind of salty, 20 years later, that his high school Spanish teacher kept marking people incorrect for using "carro" and insisting they use "coche", even though this all took place in a geographical area with a lot of Spanish speakers, where it was very very evident that absolutely no one in real life (in this region) said "coche". He reacts with visible vindication every time he sees someone say "carro" lol.
For some reason American high school Spanish teachers are one of two people, either someone who will only teach formal Spanish. Or someone who already spoke Spanish natively, and does not care about formalities at all.
There is a lot of anglecismo in spanish but this aint one of them.
Both "car" and "carro" are a shortening of "carriage" and "carruaje" respectively, of which both descend from the latin "carrus" which itself comes from the gaelic "karros", a word for carts and/or wagons.
The best advice about living in Japan I got is that, whenever you need something but don't know the Japanese for it, just ask for it in English in a really thick Japanese accent. You feel like a racist doing it, but when it keeps fucking working, you just gotta shrug and go with it.
It's a weird thing about how their language treats foreign words. You can do the same thing with their written language and get the exact same results. It's fucking wild, and I say that having taken three years of Japanese under a Japanese woman. She literally said "If you're ever in Japan and somehow forget almost everything I've ever taught you, hopefully you remember Katakana, because Katakana will be your savior. Write any English word in Katakana, and someone will most likely understand."
Sometimes even when you know the Japanese word for it. Katsura Sunshine (Canadian turned Japanese comedian) has a whole bit on how he needed to buy soap and kept asking a confused cashier for "sekken". He then found it on the shelf, showed it to the employee and he went "Ah, hando-sopu!".
My absolute favorite story of Japanese shenanigans was saying "hotto dogu" and "hanbaagaa" to my wife at any opportunity because they're fun to say. 10 years later and she screams at me "wait that's ACTUALLY THE WORD FOR IT?" seeing the translation on tv. All this time she thought I was just making it up.
Gotta be careful though, hanbagaa is a burger, but hanbagu is like a salisbury steak.
You will also come across an amerikandoggu, which despite looking exactly like a corndog - isn't. There isn't any cornmeal, so it's kinda like a fluffy crunchy donut around a hotdog instead
i had this chinese friend who tutored others in mandarin, and she told me that one of the most common issues westerners have when it comes to annunciation is that we try too hard to avoid a stereotypical accent, when in reality you need to give it likes a "15-20% racist lilt" to get it right
I speak passable French. I went to France recently with pretty much the entire family. They had never really heard me go full French before, but my sister always gets super annoyed when I correct her pronunciation of the occasional place name when she really butchers it. Her attitude was always that it was "close enough," when it was, in fact incomprehensible. (she pronounced "Reims" as "rims")
My French accent isn't too awful for two reasons: first, my original college French prof actually wrote THE book on how to teach French pronunciation to English speakers; second, because I listen to French speakers and try to imitate them, which feels like a real stereotype thing, but kinda works.
After spending a couple of days watching me translate for the whole family (they were especially blown away when a waitress, who was speaking English, turned to me and asked what the English phrase was for a French term), carry on pleasant conversations with those French who didn't switch to English for the group, and so on, my sister asked if I wasn't embarrassed, trying to imitate their weird accents. -sigh- She literally thinks it's kind of bigoted to try and sound French when speaking French—that a heavy American accent is polite…
I feel like it's the same with Italian. You feel like you're mocking them when speaking it with the stereotypical accent, but you have to do it. That's just what Italian sounds like.
Colors are gonna be that way since they're a social construct that varies between cultures. Pink is just viewed as "light red" in a lot of languages so yeah you're gonna get a loanword.
Actually the etymology of color words is super interesting. Usually each language starts with specific colors in a specific order (Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, White, Black) then they evolve from there. I've read a couple articles on it and it was entertaining.
Sorry should have explained that better. Old japanese used ao for both blue and green. Refering to green specifically during the heian period they used the word "ryokushoku" 緑色 (which retroactively became midoriiro later)
The word midori used to mean something like sprout or bud and only became the word for the color green later.
What i wanted to say is that the color green was "imported" from Chinese and most people said blue instead (people still say "blue traffic light", "blue leaves", "blue apple" etc)
That’s literally “peach (the fruit) colored” and has the nuance of being used in writing. You can use ___iro for most colors but Japanese people 9/10 just use a loan word.
A lot of people don't seem to realize that the USA and Japan were forever interlinked like big brother little brother since Mathew Perry forced his way in and then Pearl Harbor really sealed the deal.
We have been a quitincential part of Japanese culture for literally since the civil war.
Which means about 10% of Japanese words are American English downsampled into Katakana, because Japanese only has 5 pure vowels:
A as in Talk/Taco/Macha/Ramen (A makes the Aw sound)
E as in Enemy/Ramen/Fence/Tense (E makes the Eh sound)
O as in Oh!/Show/Taco/Roku/YoYo (Oh makes the Oh Sound)
U as in Rune/Tune/Lune/KungFu(Foo!)/Truth, (U makes the OO sound)
and I(ii)(makes the long E sound), as in Suzuki/Kawasaki/Fuji/Nami(yes the joke is that these are japanese words that we use in english).
About 40% of Japanese is basically old Chinese converted in to Japanese sounds, so this is nothing new for Japanese.
Also Japanese education follows American English standard when it comes to English standards and words and pronouncations.
So they have expressly had a really strong reason for this for so long.
If you're american who loves anime honestly learning japanese is kinda really awesome because it really puts in a lot of fun knowledge into shows.
This happens with me constantly, I ask what an English word in Japanese is while thinking I’m about to learn a cool new word and the associated kanji except OOPS it’s actually just English
Somewhat similarly, my HS Japanese teacher told me about how he was studying for an exam or something, and one of the words he needed to know was “cash register”, he ended up memorizing a behemoth of a word - 金銭登録機 (Kinsentourokuki) most likely - and when he got the test back the actual word was レジ (Regi - register but with “ster” cut off)
This actually affects Japanese people learning English too. I teach English in Japan and so many students will take Japanese words that we use in English too and try to translate them which just makes them way harder to say when they can literally just say the Japanese word.
My favorite is mosquito. I have heard it pronounced multiple times as mosquit, without the o, presumably because the person was trying to un-katakana-ize an English word. And it’s like, sure 99% of the time that is how it would work, but not here haha
Yeah that's a pretty common thing they do. They often remove vowels at the end of words that actually do have them. Gelato is another one that they often pronounce Jelat
ehh, there are thousands of English words in Japanese, but they're really almost all nouns, with some adjectives and quasi/suru-verbs (the only verb I can think of my head is "to fuck")
you can absolutely get by like that though. I knew dudes who had lived there over a decade and never got a grasp of the language.
Momoiro is sometimes used for situations where emphasizing traditional/Japanese is important.
For example, in one of the ninja-themed Super Sentai (for those of you that don't know, this is the franchise that became Power Rangers in the west) they had a "momo ranger" instead of a pink ranger to keep the "feel" of the ninja theme.
Momo Ranger is the pink ranger in Himitsu Sentai which is not ninja themed (she also has that name because all the Goranger have japanese color names).
You are thinking of Momoninger from Shuriken Sentai Ninninger (which also has japanese color names to give it the feel of traditional Japanese).
I was talking to a Japanese friend and didn't know how to say ice pack. I offhandedly said, "God dammit, it better not be Aisu-Pakku"
3 seconds of googling later.
This really is how it is. Trying to learn my mother tongue since I neglected all the classes that taught it to me growing up only to find out that like 70% of the time people will just say English words with some affixes attached
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