Anyone have any dealings with English speaking Japanese?

PaulStat

PaulStat

PaulStat

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I always thought the old stereotype of them getting their l's and their r's confused was just that a stereotype.

But oh no, they don't only mis pronounce some words, they mistype them too. Reading for some quite funny reading sometimes.

Such as

"That's exactry what I tried....."

and

"I tried to do it again this way, is this collect?"

Oh sweeping generalisations are fun aint they :D
 
Just how it works, I have problems saying the "th" sound in thousand and problems with v/w after living in UK for 11+ years.
 
Well I'd like to see you try type Japanese :p.

More importantly Japanese people find it very hard to hear out the difference between Right and Light, it is said that only people who learn English from a young age can distinguish the two clearly due to a part of the brain evolving just for this purpose.

Will look for trust worthy source.

I also make lots of spelling mistakes in English.. but nothing rike that ^^
 
PESolution said:
You should try watching Big Brother, oh wait sorry, "Bigggggg - a - Bwuvvvaaaa"
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They also tend to add vowels onto the end of words, I remember being out there when the world cup was on a few years ago (2006) and it was all about Crouchy and Gerrado :)

Also I was told by someone whilst there (who was a teacher) that in their alphabet they don't really have the letter l or something, hence it's pronounced 'wrong'. I even saw a watch shop where some of the watch displays were actually spelt Rorex (was a proper posh shop too, not a knock off place)!
 
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Ev0 said:
Also I was told by someone whilst there (who was a teacher) that in their alphabet they don't really have the letter l or something, hence it's pronounced 'wrong'.
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True datz, br0. They don't really have an alphabet in the traditional English sense, either. They have separate characters for single vowels (and 'n'), but all others are a combination of two (or sometimes three) letters. Most start with a consonant and end in a vowel.

Ex. Omedetou = O_me_de_to_u = Congratulations.

So that word has 5 syllables, and would contain 5 Characters of the Japanese alphabet. And for the record, Chinese is entirely different. Japanese actually has two 'versions' of its alphabet, both used together for different purposes. They also still use quite a few of the traditional Chinese characters to replace entire words, but a lot of these have changed in many ways, so they can't really be used or understood by the Chinese or any other country that inherited their writing system.
 
Ev0 said:
Also I was told by someone whilst there (who was a teacher) that in their alphabet they don't really have the letter l or something, hence it's pronounced 'wrong'.
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This is correct. Many English words are converted directly in to Japanese and since their alphabet doesn't contain any L's, they are all simply replaced with R's. For example, a 'Lighter' becomes 'Raitaa' and so this is where it stems from.
 
SpicyDuck said:
They also still use quite a few of the traditional Chinese characters to replace entire words, but a lot of these have changed in many ways, so they can't really be used or understood by the Chinese or any other country that inherited their writing system.
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Not quite correct, the Chinese would be able to read some Japanese words (the ones which are written in kanji) to get the meaning but not be able to pronounce them and vice versa.
 
isn't it the other way? when ever a japanese person tries to pronuonce words like lighter, they tend to procounce it with an R (righter), but when pronounced as Japanese it sounds way more like Lighter (Laita-)
 
The 'R' sound in Japanese is like a hybrid between L and R in English. We don't have that sound. So just as they can't pronounce L and R properly, we typically can't get their R right.
 
ic1male said:
Not quite correct, the Chinese would be able to read some Japanese words (the ones which are written in kanji) to get the meaning but not be able to pronounce them and vice versa.
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That's what I said. :confused:

I didn't want to use the term 'Kanji' or anything else, though. Otherwise I would've had to explain and write even more, for the 'general' reader, who might not be aware of some things.

But yes, Kanji (Japanese) is the name given to the more traditional (inherited) Chinese 'Hanzi' (Characters). But over time, a fair majority of these have undergone changes and, as such, Chinese people can't really read them. The pronunciation of the Character will not be mutually understood in either language, but the written Chinese Hanzi is sometimes (and sometimes not) the same as the Japanese Kanji, in written form only.

I believe there are even a few exceptions to that, too. Regardless, you have to take into account that Chinese has two official written forms - traditional and simplified - of which the latter is the most popular, and thus has even less in common with the Japanese Kanji.
 
I deal with Japanair pilots on a daily basis and they're usually pretty good. One of my colleagues had a funny moment...

"Japanair 421, route direct LEDBO"

His reply was...

"Ohh Randan Contror, you have a raff with me, you know ahh can't say REDBO!"


The Chinese pilots are much worse, especially China Eastern. Some of those guys really struggle.
 
Remember my teacher friend also saying that Japanese children can't even read a newspaper front to back until they are something liek 16 due to the complexities of one of the alphabets.

I could just about manage with the stuff that was all syllabal type stuff like recognising coca cola etc :)
 
I had a Chinese lecturer at uni who was teaching us a lot of stuff about matricies, always saying "lows" instead of "rows" which actually got quite irritating after a while.
 
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