One of the things that I didn’t understand about Japan until I’d been here several times is that while Japanese borrows a number of words from English, they often aren’t pronounced in English as such. My friend Dan tried to explain this to me some years ago but it didn’t really sink in until after I’d started studying Japanese and hence had a better grasp of the phonetic differences between the two languages. Most of the sounds in Japanese are present in English, but the converse is not true. Japanese has no “th” or “v” consonants, for instance. On the other hand, “r” in Japanese has a sort of strange roll to it that makes the (in)famous confusion of the “l” and “r” sounds somewhat more complicated than the stereotypes would lead you to believe.
What this boils down to is that there are many English words that simply cannot be pronounced correctly by most Japanese because they aren’t used to producing many of the necessary sounds. (English is taught in all schools, but the emphasis is placed on reading rather than conversation.) The point that esscaped me is that these words get strangely reshaped in the process. There’s also an apparent reluctance to ending any word with a consonant; usually an “oh” or “oo” sound is added to the end of foreign words which end in a consonant. Hence, for example, the word “hot” is pronounced “hoe toe” because there is no short “o” sound, and heaven help us if we don’t end the word with a vowel. Actually the first syllable rhymes with “oat” and there’s a sort of hiccup-like pause betwee the two syllables. Some phonemes aren’t altered at all, so for example “old fashioned” comes out sounding like “oh-rue-dough fah-shun”.
The practical upshot of this is that conversations go more smoothly if you adopt the local (mis)pronunciations. One might logically assume that carefully enunciating English words makes it easier to be understood, but one would be wrong. To use the example that Dan give me years ago, you’re more likely to be understood by the nice young woman behind the counter in a coffee shop if you ask for a “cah-fay rah-tay, hoat-toe” rather than a hot cafe’ latte’. Today, for instance, I asked for a “jeen-jaw ay-roo” and was understood immediately
This is partly why I think one should learn the katakana character set first, rather than hiragana. They represent the same set of sounds, but katakana is used for foreign words. If you can read katakana, you know the set of sounds at your disposal, and you can read the foreign words on menus and signs. Thus you’ll be able to order things like a “bren-do ko-hee” along with a “chee-zu sahn-do-ee-chee”.
Those words are even more fun to learn if you know English as a second language. Each one of them works as a pun, since there’s an additional semantic jump required to understand their meaning. “Why do they use ‘nekutai’ to mean a gravata?”. One second later, “Oh…”
Phoneme-wise, Portuguese covers all but one sound in Japanese (the hh in ‘hito’). The lack of syllables ending in consonants (except for -n) also sounds strange for us, until you get the rule written in your post. That came early to my class when we saw that “Burajiru” was “Brazil” – there’s no br, z or l, not to mention a terminal l, in Japanese!
As for the rolled r’s, they’re easy to correct if you pay attention how your tongue is positioned. Say some american r’s and compare to the japanese pronounciation. They’re almost like h’s, but are done pressing the tongue tip upwards instead of downwards. I just don’t get why americans call the japanese (and portuguese) r’s “rolled”. I feel it should be the other way around, English r’s are the rolled ones, at least for this brazilian.
When I worked at the Beanery in Eugene, I was always amazed at how much more trouble I had understanding orders through Japanese accents (and frequently mortified; when you ask someone to repeat their order for the fourth time, you start to worry that they’ll think you’re giving them a hard time) than I did through most other languages I came across. It hadn’t really dawned on me at that point the particular ways in which the languages and sounds varied.
On the other hand, my first full day in Dublin, I thought I was going to get thrown out of an Internet cafe for my inability to understand the instructions I was being given by another native English speaker…
Hey! My “anti-spam word” for this post was the three-letter English synonym for “cha,” which seemed appropriate. I hope the cheese sandwich was tasty! Did I ever tell you about the egg&sausage breakfast sandwich at the Starbucks near Sanrio Purayrandoh?
Oh! We are having such fun with this in our house! We don’t eat pancakes, we eat “hoe-toe cakey” and so forth. On thing that has proved confusing all three years of school has been Ruthie and Lucy’s names. In addition to being the same age and looking very similar, I did couldn’t have anticipated when they were born that their names would sound identical too (roughly “roo-shee”). Each teacher they have had has dealt with this differently. Fun stuff!