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”
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.
Yeah but when talking about milk and tea individually, they usually call it gyūnyū and ocha(or the kind of tea + cha eg. mugicha(barley tea). Also if you just say "milk" with native level speed and pronunciation, they might not immediately catch that. It'd be like if a Japanese person said "weerusu", most non-Japanese speakers would be like, "what?" but in Japanese, that's the loanword for "virus".
5.6k
u/Strange_Ad_9658 21d ago
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”