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[gothwalk]

Where does Engrish come from? The Japanese are so precise about everything else, and yet there's this imprecise (albeit evocative) stream of non-English coming from Japan.

For some reason, one of the top searches that keeps grounding out on dukestreet.org is "How to make a mechanical arm".

The Helsinki Museum of Modern Art has comics for sale. Why don't we get that in the Anglophone parts of the planet?

I like living in a time and place where I can discuss the pronunciation of haecceity, where to get episodes of Battlestar Galactica, and XSL selection, while listening to OPM's rather anthemic Heaven is a Halfpipe.

Comments

[loupblanc.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised you're questioning "Engrish" so easily.

You are learning some Finnish are you not? As such you should become aware of the differences both lexically and gramatically between English and another language. One language will have one word for concepts like "still", "yet", "already", another will have several words for "snow". Japanese is very much a contextual language. In a purely structural point of view, it can be very unprecise. So to render this unprecision into something comprehansible in its own context can be quite hard.

Also you probably know this but "Engrish" comes from the fact that "r" and "l" are one and the same in Japanese pronuncitation and so adapting their writing system to our Western one requires a thorough knowledge of vocabulary.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

I know the r/l difference, and I've heard of the peculiar practice of tongue-cutting due to a belief that Westerners have longer tongues, and can therefore pronounce the two sounds differently.

I've a grip on a good few languages, so I recognise lexical and grammatical differences. The transition from Irish to English results in many of the peculiarities of the Anglo-Irish use of English - the godawful formation "I do be going", instead of "I go" or even "I am going" is a fairly direct translation of the Irish equivalent.

But none of that accounts fully, in my mind, for a sentence like: "Canned beverage make you refresh" - it's constructs like these that are usually referred to as Engrish, alongside the sometimes wholly incomprehensible instructions you get with Japanese electronics.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

That answers my question most perfectly, thank you.

[loupblanc.livejournal.com]

(from Basic Japanese Through Comics):

Sorry to ask but I have a book on learning Japanese through Manga and I was wondering if that's the same book. Mine's in French but it's the translation of I book that was first written, I think, in Portuguese (or Spanish). Unfortuantely, I don't have the name of the author of the top of my head. I will do when I get back home. I really like the book I have, it's the only one that talks about onomatopes. ^^