20 Americans ridiculing Japanese's English: examples
Description
This article is from the Japanese FAQ, by TANAKA Tomoyuki tanaka@cs.indiana.edu and Olaf Meeuwissen olaf@IMSL.shinshu-u.ac.jp with numerous contributions by others.
20 Americans ridiculing Japanese's English: examples
example 1:
Edwin O. Reischauer. The Japanese Today. (1988)
"Unfortunately the Japanese have proved notably inept at
learning to speak foreign languages or to comprehend them
aurally." (Page 387)
Tanaka's response:
"Well, Mr Reischauer, you should talk. you were born in
Japan, and lived there many years, and yet, you never
became fluent in Japanese."
example 2:
Jared Taylor. Shadows of the rising sun, 1983. Pages 229-236
(pretty comprehensive; in these several pages Taylor manages to
make fun of Japanese's English in most of the standard ways:
L and R, nonsense on T-shirts, nonsensical brand names, etc.)
example 3:
1-hour PBS TV show entitled "The Japanese Version" (1991) is
entirely on the Japanese imitation of American culture:
Japanese cowboys in Tokyo, etc.
there is a section on "The English Craze": ungrammatical
English in commercials, etc.
example 4:
an American publisher (Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc.) published
two books devoted to making fun of Japanese's English:
(both by Miranda Kenrick)
--- Gems of Japanized English: "Is that an 'L' as in Rome?"
"No, it's 'R' as in London", 1988
--- More Gems of Japanized English, 1992
more examples are found on Usenet in the current thread.
one example:
> [...] of all the people I met in Japan who claimed to have
> studied English extensively (or even had degrees in English),
> none could communicate effectively. Their high school and
> college English courses were geared toward reading, and the
> vast majority of english texts I saw were full of errors.
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