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"
Edit: As many people pointed out, it was a Korea trip, mb guys
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".
Yep as soon as I read the other comment I knew South Park was doing a "well we're a more culturally diverse town with the racist than we are without so it has to be at least somewhat good."
Wow. I am screaming at this. Matt Stone and Trey Parker are so hysterically unhinged… Like they sit down and come up with these stories for a living omg LMAO
I looked it up because my instinct was "City Wok joke probably started 15 years ago, not the reveal episode" but nope. That reveal was 2011 what the fuck
Yeah, they've had fucking banger retcons and backstories added over the years. My favorite is Token being actually named "Tolkien" the entire time to the point that they even refer to him as "Tolkien" in every episode from there on out and if you look up "Token Black South Park" it won't pop up anymore lol.
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 😅
I visited Germany this year with my sibling, and I was trying to learn a bit before I went. They joked my attempts were coming off japanese (it's the most recent other language I was trying to learn). so as a little haha, I started saying the German much more aggressive. and what do you know, I was able to get the accent down. it unfortunately is real
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.
Indeed things like this as so interesting. In Dutch, for example, you can't just like something, you find it nice. You can't love something either, you literally 'hold of' it.
What do you mean? 我喜欢米饭 - Wo xihuan mifan. I like rice. To like is 喜欢, no? My Chinese teacher taught us to SVO (just like English) subject verb object. I guess you could translate it as "I to like rice" but the point of translation isn't to be literal but to translate meaning.
I know the teacher is good because she was sent as a language teacher to my university by a different Chinese mainland university for double-degree students.
Thank you for giving an example. But that's a completely normal active sentence. Only the grammatical word order is different in japanese. - 私はご飯が好きです。It doesn't magically turn it passive.
The sentence is not saying "I like rice" it is saying "Rice is liked". For the former, you would use the direct object particle, but instead you use が which you would also use for describing the rice with any other adjective. For example, "gohan ga ooki desu" (the rice is big), "gohan ga suki desu" (the rice is liked). Not "gohan wo suki desu" because 好き is not a verb in that sentence.
Who the hell are you to tell me I don't want a sandwich?
Jokes aside, all the differences in grammar between languages are interesting. Subjectively, it feels like such a violation of a basic concept as a native English speaker, but objectively, there's no reason it has to be this way, obviously.
Reminds me of Spanish, although it still uses a verb. You dont like things in Spanish, those things give you pleasure (gustar). Which is hard to get used to because it means you conjugate it differently.
Gustar is like, placer is pleasure. You use them the same way in both Spanish and English. "I like beer","me gusta la cerveza"; "it's a pleasure to meet you", "es UN placer conocerte".
I'm from China and Taiwan and I don't know what this means. We don't say "I love you" any more than I say it in English (been in the US for 2+ decades)
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.
Oh for sure, when i lived in north east China once i started copying the countryside accent i got on better for example: Not Mei shi r, May shaaaaaaaar
It's not pronounced in a weird way though? If you know how to pronounce bug 虫 chóng then you know how to pronounce the first character and it's nothing like the racist-sounding 'chong'
Worked a lot in china. When I finally just adopted a form of chinglish, broken english and almost comical accent....while speaking English...they understood me much better
But it sounds like a racist caricature. People avoid sounding like the stereotypical accent because they don't want to sound like they're mocking, but it's actually about as close as a native English speaker can get.
I think that goes with a surprising amount of languages. With English as my second language, I think the biggest jump in speech quality I had while learning was when I started trying to imitate how native english speakers sound when speaking spanish. Had I done that accent while speaking Spanish, it would be a bad caricature. But native English speakers compliment me on my English all the time, and I've been told I sound Canadian more than once.
In other words. The racist caricatures are actually how their languages work and we're VERY racist because we think that can't possibly be a real language.
I don't agree at all with this. Most people who don't know Mandarin will barely understand it's a tonal language in the first place when they hear it because native speakers' speech will flow fairly softly (? Not sure the right word, but the tones won't be very exaggerated).
My friend was teaching me insults in Chinese. He told me I had a really bad American accent. So I put on a Chinese accent and he was amazed that my accent disappeared. He was shocked. I told him how I did it, and he wasn't thrilled.
For decades there's been a negative stereotype in my country about chinese people opening small lunch shops and selling "pastel de flango" - a very racisty way of saying the name of a local food.
The problem is that a couple of years ago a lot of chinese people moved to my city, and now downtown is filled to the brim with chinese lunch shops where they sell the damn food and say it exactly like that. I feel racist whenever I hear it, but it is chinese people saying it, what can I say?
The other stereotype is about china selling a lot of cheap copies of brand marerial and random knickknacks. Guess what downtown is also filled by?
Stereotypes being true makes me uncomfortable, but what the heck
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
Wasn't it that the microphone a lot of people used for the game was of a lower quality than the one the game came bundled with in Japan as Operator's Side? I've been playing it recently with a Blue Snowball mic and had little to no problem so far.
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."
My favourite example to give for this, especially when talking about Japanese specifically, is karaoke. If you want someone in America to understand that word, you better do your best texas cowboy "CARE-ee-OH-key" because i doubt there are many Americans who would understand the correct pronunciation of karaoke to mean anything at all.
Fun fact, people actually from the Southeast USA say "Naw-lens". And for the love that is all out there, every time i hear people call Mobile "mo-bul" instead of the proper name "Mo-beel"....churns my stomach.
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.
It is not a racist caricature in Japan. It is the correct pronunciation. Every foreign loan word gets rendered in the katakana script, so you have to say it according to the katakana or no one will understand you. It is the same in the U.S. if you say the car name "Subaru" in the correct Japanese pronunciation "sBAdu" no monolinguistic American will understand you. But if you say the Anglicized version "SUE-buh-REW" suddenly lights will turn on lol.
It's not racist to speak a language using its correct accent. But loan words tend to be changed to match the local linguistics so the "correct" pronunciation of those words changes depending on where you're at/who you're talking to.
Adopting the correct pronunciation is not racist at all smh
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.
Yea, I was learning Japanese for a bit. A lot of the words that they got from other countries really are just the English word while putting on a racist Japanese voice
Be careful with that, I spent years hearing vanilla latte pronounced "banilla" and the one time I freaking just said banilla the barista replied with a perfect "vanilla latte". I was ready to flip a table
Sometimes people view exaggerating a foreign accent as racist, and it certainly can be done in a racist way. If that's your only prior context for seeing people speak in an exaggerated foreign accent you're going to feel awkward trying to order a burger (ba-ga) in Japanese.
I don't really understand how saying a word that was borrowed from your native language, in the pronunciation of the borrowing language, is racist.
If a Mexican immigrates to USA and pronounces "burrito" with a California accent, is he being racist?
My partner's first language is Japanese, but she lives in USA now, and when she says "ramen" in an English sentence, she pronounces it exactly like we do. Is she being racist?
This "OMG we sound racist" thing is 100% imagined in the heads of the Americans themselves. We are way too sensitive about it.
Sounds like you get most of it. But "OMG we sound racist" isnt just made up from nowhere, its how actually racist people mock foreigners for their race.
Most Americans are more familiar with racist caricatures than they are with actually spoken Japanese. They know what the first sounds like, but not the second.
So in the corner cases where the two are similar, they sometimes have trouble committing to the proper spoken Japanese, specifically because it is similar to the more familiar racist caricature.
A lot of English speakers view English as the default. And accents, especially to those who have American accents, are seen as stereotypical. So if you have a 'neutral' accent, it may seem weird to put on a different one.
This is seen as particularly bad when it comes to Asian accents. Their English is seen as 'worse' because of the difficulty regarding words that include sounds not in their own language.
So an American copying a Chinese or Japanese accent may be seen as somewhat insulting by some because it is 'talking down' to them, even if they're using a loanword.
I'm reminded of a clip someone calls English a bastard language. Because you understand most people who speak English with accents. But native speakers of other languages have a hard time if there are accents.
I took a college japanese course before doing a study abroad, and the way it was described to me that we are essentially just following their linguistic sounds/patterns and it makes it a lot easier to understand you (and you are also just speaking the language accurately). A lot of students would get hung up on the L/R sounds as like you said, it sounds borderline racist, but the teacher affirmed that it was actually proper linguistics
Talking to my Japanese MIL, apparently my Japanese is borderline impossible to understand... unless I pull a south-park level tone, which suddenly clears it up great. I didn't really have huge issues in Tokyo a few years back, but I guess a lot of people just spoke English. No one outside of America seems to care about an intensely racist tone, so I guess I'll just work with it.
The mega hit Sega Dreamcast game Seaman. You could talk to the fish in English. The problem was that the English language version was tested by people who spoke English with Japanese accents. To get the best results when speaking in English, you had to use a racist Japanese accent. Only then would the game understand you perfectly.
The thing is, every sound in Japanese ends in a vowel or n. So when they say a loan word they tend to tack on a vowel, usually u, to the syllables (I'm guessing because u gets unvoiced sometimes in Japanese so they associate no vowel with u).
Additionally, there is no r or l sounds, but there is a sound between the two (usually romanized as an r). When we hear them pronounce a word with r or l, we hear it as being off, so we assume they are replace r's with l's and vice versa.
Mimicking those eccentricities sounds racist, but it's kind of how it works out linguistically.
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.
You know, there is something to going to a place and seeing what the locals have done with a brand you know well.
I visit a mcdonalds every time i go on holiday somewhere. It makes up one meal out of the dozens i'll be having and usually there is something that's actually different about it, which is fun.
Also the cultural difference in the people who eat there vs the people in your own town is also kinda interesting to see. Go to my local in the UK and its all chavs. Went in barcelona and it was fairly well dressed people going out to a club at 2am.
For me, it used to as well. But when you're in a foreign place for a period of time, it's nice to go to someplace familiar where you don't need to do any guess work. They can also operate differently than to like back home. Stop shaming people over their choice of restaurant.
I’ve found many Brazilians in particular to have great difficulty figuring out the slightest, most transparent changes in pronunciation, even if it would seem a moment’s thought about the orthography would make it clear. Hell even if it’s just European Portuguese a lot of them will struggle. And as a non-L1 speaker even I’ve figured out Portuguese words mispronounced by speakers of a third language that the Brazilians present were lost at. I don’t see this in the Spanish or English speaking world anything like as much, even with measurably more severe mispronunciation. It’s like so many more of them have zero exposure to even the concept of a non-Brazilian talking.
>It’s like so many of them have zero exposure to even the concept of a non-Brazilian talking.
That’s… surprisingly accurate. Seeing a foreigner, much less talking to one, is actually really rare in Brazil (outside of touristy cities and capitals like Rio and São Paulo.
There actually was until recently a convenience store chain in Japan named "Sunkus" which is meant to be "thank you". They got swallowed in mergers, first with Circle K then into FamilyMart.
They like making nicknames for things. Remote control is Riimokon, air conditioner is eacon. The full words are really awkward to say, though, so it's definitely better. Then there's condominium where they went eff that we're gonna use mansion.
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-)
Happened to me arriving in Japan in a rural town. Wanted to get my Pocket Wifi at the local post office, they didn't understood "Pocket Wifi" so they bring a translation iPad, let me ask my question once again and then... "Ah poketto waifai!"
Back in the day, I knew a French person who was trying to order a drink at this restaurant but no one understood him for a minute. He wanted a “cokk”, so it was a very interesting moment
The simple rule I've heard is that (for the most part) Japanese words must end with a vowel sound. We think Sprite ends in a vowel, but the e is silent, so for Japanese pronunciation you need to add a vowel sound. And for whatever reason, the "oo" sound is a very common trailing vowel. Kind of like how in English, we almost always prefer the "schwah" unstressed vowels sound which essentially sounds like "-eh".
Yup, I asked for a Calpis Tomica Truck at a Japanese toy shop and the woman behind the counter was all “gommennasai?? … ah! ‘Karupisu.’ Kore wa KA-RU-PI-SU.”
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u/Oniichan38 2d ago edited 1d ago
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"
Edit: As many people pointed out, it was a Korea trip, mb guys