Like that South Park episode about Xbox vs PlayStation.
“Sony has announced a new Black Friday bundle, called the ‘Burack Friday Bunduru.’”
Somehow I just knew these words would get the Japanizu treatment
It must be because they love and respect British culture so much, right? 😁 (pic related: Japan when they find out about britain)
My absolute favourite is
フライドポテト furaido poteto
French friesMy favorite in my one semester of college Japanese was:
Hotto chokareto (hot chocolate)
ホットチョコレート
When I was a kid, before you could translate stuff on the internet and we were waiting months for the new batch of translated Dragonball Z episodes to hit Toonami (I swear, if I come home from school today and it’s goddamn Radditz again, I’m gonna Destructo Disc my mom’s Camry), I got like a tiny little I guess travel book for translating English to Japanese thinking that maybe I’d start learning.
The only word I remember is “hamburger” because the book showed the Japanese pronunciation as “haam baah gaah” lol
That’s pretty close, though!
The thing is, the Japanese language has very few sounds compared to most languages, so their loan words have to be forced into the system of sounds they have.
For «hamburger» specifically, they don’t have any of the vowel sounds in the English word. They also lack the rhotic «r» sound, or really any «r» sound at all (edit: that is similar to the languages they loan words from). Their «a» sound is an open sound as in «say aah», so they just ended up using a long version of it to approximate the «ur» and «er» sounds (which are really similar in American English!).
My favorite one is “Urubarin”, for Wolverine! Pretty close, yet so far.
It’s even better when the English word is so riddled with vowel syllabics that Japanese phonemes require that it wraps all the way around and becomes unrecognizable…even when it’s “English.” My fav: Makkudonarudo - マックドナルド even tho most people just call it “Maku-do” for McDonalds.
Also, gotta watch out… just when you think “Pants” is just “Pantsu” you actually just said “underwear” in Japanese.
just when you think “Pants” is just “Pantsu” you actually just said “underwear” in Japanese.
To be fair, that’s also the case in English.
Yeah but I’ve never heard anyone use it that way. I don’t think anyone would mistake you for talking about underwear in most scenarios.
I wonder when American and English diverged on the meaning of pants, because it very much means underwear over here. Although with how prevalent American TV is (and I guess influencers are these days) people have no problem understanding what you mean… But we’ll have a laugh over it!
Pants in British English (and probably more) more often carries the meaning of underpants.
So I made a Japanese learning game on steam and I get hit with negative reviews all the time because it doesn’t have enough real Japanese words in it. /facepalm
Link?
No idea what one the person you replayed to made, but Wagotabi is good. It also updates fairly regularly.
