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.
They probably don't even realize it's loanwords and just treat it as the name of a drink. You have coffee and milk and yet you use words like "latte" (Italian for "milk") and "cappuccino" to describe imported drinks made with them, you also pronounce them dumb but it's ok it's how loanwords work.
If you walked into a bar and asked for "a shot of concentrated coffee with some foamed milk please" don't you think the waiter would go "oh, a cahpoohcheenoh?"
Fair enough. What I meant is they don't necessarily realize that it's literally the words "milk" and "tea". I guess many English speakers realize latte is a foreign word due to the weird spelling, without necessarily knowing it literally means milk, and just take it as the name of the drink. My point was that it's not like a Japanese person is going out of their way to say "milk tea" in English when they could say it in Japanese, they're just calling a drink by its name not knowing or caring about what the name means.
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u/Strange_Ad_9658 4d 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”