We Engrishi Lovu!

The Japanese are obsessed with English words. They love them. Every t-shirt I see has English on it, magazine covers all have English, and product labels use English too. There’s even more English if you count the katakana. Katakana is a set of Japanese letters used to write foreign words. So, you see some Japanese, realize its katakana, and then you can try to decode what the English is. The thing is, Japanese has a fraction of the sounds that English does, so the katakana letters can’t accurately represent English. So, the English represented by katakana is not actually English – it’s Japenglish. I have to go over a word a bunch of times and repeat it out loud before I can understand what the English is supposed to be. It’s like a little game (but the stakes are fairly high – Is this “shi chiken” (a.k.a. tuna)? or some horrible, horrible abomination?).

There are so many borrowed English words in Japanese. They’ve even gone to the extent of replacing Japanese words with Japenglish ones. What’s the Japanese word for “orange” (the color)? Who knows, it’s “orenji” now. How do you say “door” in Japanese? Who cares, they write “doa” on them in katakana.

You’d think with all these English words, they’d be able to write or speak English, right? No. Even with their love of English words, they have a complete inability to put them together to form anything coherent. Here is are some samples: from some lotion packaging – “It puts the lotion on its back.” From a ‘curriculum’ that was given to me by an elementary school principal – “Let a mouth learn English aloud well. I let a mouth learn English conversation! Even if I do not learn a character, please learn a sound.” From the same ‘curriculum’ – “Please become the one where a mother answers as possible at first. The English thing which I do not understand is Japanese, and please answer. It is practiced what.” How am I supposed to design lessons based on that?!