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.<\/p>\n
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”.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
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”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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… Continue reading Spee King Ing Grish<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan-2012-2","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1937"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1938,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1937\/revisions\/1938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}