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
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 absolute favourite is
フライドポテト furaido poteto
French fries
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.
My favorite in my one semester of college Japanese was:
Hotto chokareto (hot chocolate)
ホットチョコレート