YouTuber and full-time Japan fan Sharla is back this week with a brand new video. After bringing us exploding condom ice cream and giving us a peek inside one of Japan’s typical love hotels, she’s currently back in her native Canada and just for kicks decided to try out a few English loan words that appear in the Japanese language on her non-Japanese-speaking friend.
As we’re about to see, despite the majority of these words originally coming from English, once pumped through the Japanese lexicon and read back to a native English speaker they make almost zero sense. The full, laugh-out-loud video after the jump.
In much the same way that English has adopted numerous words from other languages, Japanese is peppered with words and phrases from the outside world, which have become so much a part of the language that few would guess at their foreign origins unless they happened to see them written down (in which case they’d appear in katakana script).
But the thing is, the Japanese phonetic alphabet is vastly different to the English alphabet. Apart from “n”, every consonant has a vowel sound attached to it, which explains why so many borrowed foreign words appear in Japanese with vowel sounds that never existed in the word’s original form, and some sounds have to be replaced with whatever comes closest. Thus “book” becomes “bukku“, “cat food” becomes “kyatto fuudo“, and this writer’s name comes out as “Firippu” (I can assure you, there is no poo in my name…).
So how did Sharla’s pal do with a list of 10 words borrowed from other languages by the Japanese? Check out the video and see for yourself!
Remember kids, that’s “kanningu“, and NOTHING else…
Source: YouTube via Tochan.net