It’s English* Jim, but not as we know it…(dealing with Japanese English)

When I first came to Japan, I was confidently expecting not to understand a thing, having already heard how fiendishly difficult the language and its writing system were and having experienced how difficult the Japanese found speaking in English. From the moment I landed, I was pleasantly suprised how much English I saw and heard everywhere- but I quickly found that it was at least as difficult to understand ‘Japanese English’ as it was to work out how many syllables there were supposed to be in ‘Irrashaimase’. And there started a little obsession with Japanese English that hasn’t finished 4 years and two books on Japanese English later. Here are my excuses for my continued fascination:
· Understanding Japanese English can help you to communicate at least as much as the Japanese you find in the ‘Japanese for Busy People’ textbooks. In fact, up to 10% of words in everyday Japanese conversation are in some way derived from English, and of the 3000 most common words in English, about half are used in some way in Japanese. And if you really are busy, it’s a helluva lot easier to pick up Japanese English than it is to learn kanji.
· It can often be very funny (see www.Engrish.com for some more unconventional examples)
· The way the Japanese freely borrow words from the English language, then even more freely change them, is remarkably similar to how they adopt and adapt Western festivals, technology and foodstuffs. It suddenly all begins to make sense..
· Your attitude to and knowledge of Japanese English can really help you help your students communicate in ‘English English’.

Apart from the many many words and expressions that are used with more or less the same meaning and pronunciation (and which there is no room to deal with here as you can find very very thick dictionaries on it), there are several ways in which “Japanese English” deviates from the English words it was derived from and so makes it difficult to switch between the two “varities” of English for you when you are speaking Japanese and for your students when they are trying not to speak Japanese. The main categories are:

1. Words and expressions entirely ‘made in Japan’ from English words
2. The meaning has been extended or changed from that of the original word
3. The word or expression has been abbreviated in a way that is not common in English.
4. The pronunciation changes (sometimes so much as to be almost unrecognisable)
5. The English grammar changes or is ‘stripped’ from the word.
6. The meaning in Japanese is more restricted than in English
7. Japanese English words become part of worldwide English, but with a more restricted meaning

The list above is organised by how much difficulty non-Japanese speakers would have in understanding such Japanese English, and therefore by how much they will need to be dealt with in class. First of all, though, the main confusion when students try to talk about ‘a pan’ in English has nothing to do with English at all, but is because the Japanese know that most borrowed words (e.g. those written in Katakana) are borrowed from English and so drift into other languages without knowing it. In fact, the Japanese word ‘pan’ in Japanese comes from Portuguese and means bread. So, I’ve decided to deal with this point of words from other languages in my “Japanese English” post, even though it isn’t actually English at all…

Section Zero- Words have been brought into Japanese from other languages, but are often thought to be English by Japanese speakers
Here is a list of the most common examples of such misunderstandings I have come across in the classroom. You can find many many more in the handy Tuttle New Dictionary of Loanwords in Japanese, but note that some “Japanese English” words and expressions in such dictionaries are likely to be unfamiliar to some of your students. If some in the list below seem obscure too, that could be because of the number of Medical English classes I have had…

Anketo = enquete (French)= A survey
Arubaito (Ger.)= arbeit = A temporary job
Bakansu = vacances (Fr.) = holiday

Balanco (Port) = a swing
Barikan = Barriquand (brand name) = hair clippers
Biroodo = veludo (Port.) = velvet
Chakku = zip (Port)
Danbooru = cardboard
Dessan = dessin (Fr.) = rough sketch
Doitsu = Deutch (Ger.) = German
Donau kawa = the Danube
E-ge = Aegean
Ego (short e sound- from German)= ego (with ii sound in English)
Enerugii (with hard g sound Ger.)= energy (with j sound in English)
Enerugisshu (Ger.)= energetic
Esute = esthetique (Fr.) = plastic surgery or beauty salon
Gerende (German) = ski slopes

Gipsu (German) = plaster (on broken leg etc.)
Gomu = gom (Dutch)= rubber
Karee ruu = curry roux (French?) = curry powder
Karte (German) = medical records
Kasutera = Castella (Spanish or Portuguese)= sponge cake
Kirisuto (Port.) = Christ
Konkuro = concours (Fr.) = competition

Konsento= electrical socket
Konto = conte (French) = little story/ skit
Meriyasu = medias (Spanish) = knitted goods
Mesu = mes (Dutch) = scalpel

Miira (Port) = a mummy
Misa = missa (Latin) = (church) mass
Morumotto (Dutch) = Guinea Pig
Oranda = Holland/ The Netherlands
Orugiooru = music box (Dutch orgel)
Penki (Dutch) = paint
Piman (Portuguese) = a green pepper
Pinto = focus
Puchi = petit (Fr.)= small
Puchi buru = petit bourgeois
Purachina = platina (Spanish) = platinum
Randoseru = randsel (Dutch) = school satchel
Rentogen (German) = X ray
Retorte (Fr.) = canned food/ processed food
Roman (French for “a novel”) = spirit of adventure
Rosario (Port.) = rosary
Rumpen = lumpen (German)= homeless people
Salada= salad

Tema (German) = theme
toroochi= lozenge
Yudaya = Judea (Latin) = Jewish
Zubon = jupon (Fr.) = trousers

Zeminar (German) = seminar
You might be pleased to hear that the Japanese have as little respect for the original meanings of these foreign borrowings as they do for English. My favourite example of this is using abekku (= avec = French for ‘with’) to mean ‘a couple’, i.e. boyfriend and girlfriend. Nice to know there is another nationality that kills the French language more than the British… I wouldn’t point this out in class, though, because students are unlikely to see the funny side. In fact, the whole topic needs to be tackled with even more delicacy than even normal error correction.

In fact you need even more tact than the “correcting Japanese CEO in same class as his secretary” situation. The danger is that by bringing in a list like the one above into class you will make students paranoid about using any Katakana words when they try to speak English, which is not the intended effect as most of them are the same and in fact borrowed words in English are Japanese learner’s main advantage over, for example, mainland Chinese a few years ago whose only foreign word was “Bill Clinton”. In the most extreme cases, you can even make them paranoid when speaking their own language! I often get questions such as “So, when the Japanese say “rinse” instead of “conditioner”, that is wrong.” My answer is always “No, that is perfectly correct Japanese”, but I’m not sure they are convinced.

Any actual classroom activities aimed at showing the differences between “Japanese English” and varities that are more widely understood, then, should actually be mainly based around the similarities. In the case of borrowed words, if you can show students that English has borrowed and twisted the pron and meanings of foreign words at least as much as Japanese, so much the better. Both are attempted in my worksheet on the topic here.

Will really start doing what I promised to and get to points 1 to 7 above over the next few weeks (and possibly months…)
* Please note that even when not talking about words from entirely different languages the expression “Japanese English” is a complete misnomer because all the 7 (plus 1) points above are talking about words and expressions that are now part of the Japanese language and can in no way be considered part of a variety of English like Singlish in Singapore. Really it’s just a quite extreme form of borrowed language (the Japanese term is gairaigo- language that has come from outside/ from abroad). As “Japanese English” is the most widely used misnomer in the English-language literature. though, I will keep on using it. Other suggestions (apart from “Engrish”) gratefully accepted though.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 12:02 amand is filed under Common errors, Error correction, Japanese English/ Waseieigo/ Engrish, Japanese language, TESOL, Teaching vocabulary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.