Sunday, March 22, 2009

How will you say ONLY in Japanese?

Me and a friend visited a store in Jusco, the store sells interesting and funny stuffs just like Village Vanguard. While I was busy choosing for a night lamp, my friend came to me and excitingly announced that he have found something funny, out of curiosity, I followed him, he showed me this light and took a picture of it. This is the picture:
It's very common here in Japan to see such mistake in English. It can be found on everything from poorly translated signs, menus, and instruction manuals to bizarrely worded advertisements and strange t-shirt slogans. Because Japanese has only five vowels, and few consonant clusters, it's very difficult for them to recognize the difference between L and R because these sounds fall into the Ra, Ri, Ru, Re, Ro category in Japanese. Therefore, in Japanese both L and R are pronounced as one phoneme, but in English L and R are two distinct phonemes.

I admit to myself that I am not good in English there are some words which I mispronounced and my grammar is not good, but this R and L thing is really confusing. One instance, my boss was trying to point out something, he kept on saying "rok, rok, rok" in my mind I thought it's rock or 6 which is roku in Japanese. My boss went away from his desk and lock the seat beside me. That was it! rok means lock, haha in front of my boss I look stupid!

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