I'm interested in Japanese and tried to learn a little bit. I'm just a beginner, know how to read some of the Kana(s) by listening to Anime songs, using google translate and try to realize some of them. I'm a Chinese so I can guess the meaning of the Kanji(s).

However, as a Hong Kong people. I felt so embarrass to read those katakana English.
For example, Smartphone= smadophone(even worse, smadohon).

In Hong Kong, we have better method to make transliteration. We'll try to use the most similar pronunciation's Chinese word to represent the word from other language.
But Japanese seems to have a system to make transliteration but the katakana English doesn't even sounds like the original English word.

Still, sometimes I can find some better replacement to make it sounds like the original word more.
すまーつっふぉん vs スマーツッフォン
(Smartphone)
アップル vs エッポウ
(Apple)
(Just some stupid examples. Maybe they don't make sense to you.)

I'm not a racist. But the katakana transliteration system is so stupid to me.
Japanese(the language) is full of these transliteration and it really make me confusing.
I am only thinking that maybe they could make a better way to transliterate foreign language's words and this can reduce their Japanese accent.

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BTW, Hong Kong is not the same with mainland China. Although most of us have our own Hong Kong accent, that's much more similar to original English pronunciation.

A few things:

1. The loan words enter the spoken language and these words are now Japanese words, so it's not like they can just issue a decree that everyone must start pronouncing words differently.

2. There is no single "English pronunciation". As a native speaker of American English, I can barely recognize エッポウ as anything close to "apple". エッポウ sounds like a transcription of "Apple" as pronounced by a native Chinese speaker with an accent. To me, スマーツ is worse than スマート, since the "t" consonant of ト is closer to the English "t" in "smart" than ツ is. (Note that the word in Japanese is スマート, not スマード. I know that native Chinese speakers often have difficulty with the voiced vs. unvoiced syllables in Japanese, but the ト version is much closer to the English pronunciation than the voiced ド.)

And because this will eventually come up:

3. Don't necessarily assume that the "English" Katakana word was derived from an English word. In many cases, it was loaned from German, French and Portuguese.

In some cases, the Japanese pronounciation is _more_ correct/faithful than the English pronounciation. Jesus come to mind.

Overall, the "Katakana word doesn't sound like English!" argument is a waste of time. The English language itself loves to steal from other languages and corrupt it. I'm pretty sure Chinese does the same thing. Not a single person knows how to pronounce Karaoke correctly. And thats fine because it is an English word now.

Also, why use sumaatsu? There's no s and sumaato still sounds better.

Also, the Katakana system may be flawed but on the other hand, the fact that it is in katakana (as opposed to hira or kanji) gives you a quick visual indication of what's ahead). The Chinese pronounciation may be more faithful to the original English pronounciation than katakana but on the other hand, since you are using the Hanji for the reading and not the meaning, then translating it is a futile process.

Let me know if my understanding of how Chinese is used is incorrect.

The bad accent is usually the least ridiculous thing about katakana words when you look at the ways they're used, often in superficial attempts to sound cool or intellectual, especially in marketing and pop music.

English has plenty of butchered words too. Katakana words just take it to an extreme, but this can be an advantage to English speakers, because they're generally easy to understand and remember.

Yeah it sucks i had to look up the word メッソド only to find out its actually english. The point is no matter how much you complain they will not modify their katAkana words to whatever is closer to English. They've been using these words for quite some time. Mezzo do is method btw

The thing about the weird spellings of Japanese loan words is, they are chosen for pronunciations that sound like the original words sound to a native Japanese speaker. Then the loan word is more easily understood by Japanese people using it with each other.

Choosing a spelling that makes the loan word more understandable to people who speak the original language is useless - katakana loan words are for use between Japanese speakers, many of whom don't hear any difference between スマートフォン and スマートホン. In any case the word is usually スマホ since all those extra syllables are just in the way.

Of -course- you can't go to store in America and ask to buy a prepaid smaho, but that's not the point of borrowing a word.

People who are studying English seriously are studying it in the English alphabet and maybe even learning the pronunciation marks we use in dictionaries. (Or even, terrifying though it may be, IPA.) There's already plenty of ways to write English more-or-less accurately for people actually speaking English.

If there's a problem with Japanese learners of English misprouncing things -in English- then perhaps it'd be good to look at getting people away from kana and into the alphabet sooner. However, when they pronounce a loan word the Japanese way in Japanese ... that's not mispronunciation, that's appropriation.

Kana -is- being modified to more accurately represent loan words (especially but not exclusively from English) anyway, hence syllables like フォ and ヴィ that don't occur in Japanese. If the average Japanese person becomes even more familiar with foreign sounds, maybe the kana will be modified more.

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:Yeah it sucks i had to look up the word メッソド only to find out its actually english. The point is no matter how much you complain they will not modify their katAkana words to whatever is closer to English. They've been using these words for quite some time. Mezzo do is method btw

メッソド isn't in my dictionary. I've seen メソッド used in the context of programming.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:Kana -is- being modified to more accurately represent loan words (especially but not exclusively from English) anyway, hence syllables like フォ and ヴィ that don't occur in Japanese. If the average Japanese person becomes even more familiar with foreign sounds, maybe the kana will be modified more.

That's a good point. I saw ネガティヴ in a book yesterday. I think things have changed even in the time I've been studying.

Anyone who could work out what ウイルス was supposed to be the first time they heard it deserves a medal.

I agree with the OP in the sense that yes there are plenty of examples like this where katakana chosen for certain words are NOT the closest possible (using katakana representation of the English word. Why does this happen?

バイラス sounds 100% more like "virus" (in ANY english accent...), even to a Japanese speaker.

And someone mentioned not being able to change already established katakana words... I'm not so sure. パーテー to パーティ and アイデア to アイディア are prime examples of some words which eventually moved closer to original English pronunciation.

ウイルス comes from German which stems from Japan and Germany being tight during the war. The sounds it's using are from the German pronunciation.

English is not, by default, the correct pronunciation or correct source for borrowed words.

Javizy Wrote:The bad accent is usually the least ridiculous thing about katakana words when you look at the ways they're used, often in superficial attempts to sound cool or intellectual, especially in marketing and pop music.

If you pronounce foreign words with the original pronunciation it gives just that impression of trying to sound cool/intellectual that you describe.

SammyB Wrote:Anyone who could work out what ウイルス was supposed to be the first time they heard it deserves a medal.

I agree with the OP in the sense that yes there are plenty of examples like this where katakana chosen for certain words are NOT the closest possible (using katakana representation of the English word. Why does this happen?

バイラス sounds 100% more like "virus" (in ANY english accent...), even to a Japanese speaker.

And someone mentioned not being able to change already established katakana words... I'm not so sure. パーテー to パーティ and アイデア to アイディア are prime examples of some words which eventually moved closer to original English pronunciation.

It doesn't matter at all that the established way to pronounce that Japanese loan word isn't the closest to English. "Virus" comes from Latin and probably exists in a ton of western languages. So if we're going to be picky about originality then ウイルス is probably a better way to pronounce it than the English way, like the Jesus/イエス example that was mentioned above.

In my native language, virus is actually pronounced very similar to ウイルス so I'll take that medal! Although I don't see how you wouldn't be able to guess what it meant if you heard it in context, like my computer had a weerus and doesn't work properly.

Japanese loan words are meant to be understood by other Japanese speakers, not English speakers.

I called it:

SammyB Wrote:Anyone who could work out what ウイルス was supposed to be the first time they heard it deserves a medal.

I agree with the OP in the sense that yes there are plenty of examples like this where katakana chosen for certain words are NOT the closest possible (using katakana representation of the English word. Why does this happen?

erlog Wrote:ウイルス comes from German which stems from Japan and Germany being tight during the war. The sounds it's using are from the German pronunciation.

English is not, by default, the correct pronunciation or correct source for borrowed words.

qwertyytrewq Wrote:And because this will eventually come up:

3. Don't necessarily assume that the "English" Katakana word was derived from an English word. In many cases, it was loaned from German, French and Portuguese.

In some cases, the Japanese pronounciation is _more_ correct/faithful than the English pronounciation. Jesus come to mind.

Not directed at anyone in particular but I'm not racist but I find it amusing that English language speakers have things in common with the average American: they are arrogant and think the world revolves around them. Why is that?

I could just imagine a Japanese person learning Cantonese or Mandarin and having the exact same complaint. The Chinese way of doing it only sounds "closer" to the English to you because you're a native speaker of Chinese. I can promise you, as a professional Chinese-to-English translator and grad student in linguistics who speaks some Japanese, neither system really sounds all that close to English. But I'd say Japanese is probably closer much more often than Chinese is (though I can't speak for Cantonese, but I'd imagine the 入聲字 allow for somewhat better accuracy). Odds are, the Chinese way just sounds better to your Chinese ears because it's what you're used to, but, for instance, 莎士比亞 sounds nothing like Shakespeare, while シェイクスピア does. 哈利·波特 sounds nothing like Harry Potter, while ハリー・ポッター does. 彼得·杜拉克 doesn't sound much like Peter Drucker, while ピーター・ドラッカー does. I could go on and on. The Chinese system makes no sense most of the time, while the Japanese system often does.

Edit: Besides, you have to realize that when a word gets borrowed into Japanese (or any language), it is no longer an English/French/German/whatever word. It is a Japanese word and is pronounced according to Japanese phonology. They're usually incorporated into the grammar of the language too (hence phrases in Chinese like "老闆把我fire掉了" or "你覺得O不OK?"). Sometimes they take on entirely new meanings. They might be abbreviated in ways that seem bizarre to speakers of the language they're borrowed from (パソコン) They're no longer English (or whatever) words, so you can't (or shouldn't) think of them like they are.

Not trying to start anything but,

qwertyytrewq Wrote:they are arrogant and think the world revolves around them. Why is that?

Probably because English is the de facto international language of business. If you weren't a native speaker of English and you had to pick a single language to learn that would have the most impact, you'd probably pick English. Thats probably where the arrogance comes from.

I agree with everything you said, sir/madam.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I know that native Chinese speakers often have difficulty with the voiced vs. unvoiced syllables in Japanese..

I'm not really familiar with the idea of voiced or unvoiced syllables. What does this mean? Thanks.

gserli Wrote:In Hong Kong, we have better method to make transliteration. We'll try to use the most similar pronunciation's Chinese word to represent the word from other language.

That's exactly what katakana transliterations have been doing for Japanese. And, as others have noted here, they've been getting better at it (ホー＞フォ、ブー＞ヴ、チー＞ティ; I've even seen スィ in a couple of places, although that doesn't seem to have caught on as the default transliteration for "si" yet). What you didn't take into account, other than the fact that something that sounds like a poor approximation to you may sound passable to a Japanese speaker, is the fact that many words were borrowed at earlier stages of this transliteration system's development. Since those words have since become part of the Japanese language there's no real need to "update" their spelling now that a better transliteration system is available. The morpheme -phon(e) was rendered as ホン when it first entered the language, so most people are used to words like イヤホン and プッシュホン and see nothing wrong with a word like スマートホン emerging.

Speaking of Chinese transliterations, do you guys in Hong Kong call my country 俄羅斯 like they do on the mainland? Because if we take the Russian pronunciation as the basis this transliteration makes no sense whatsoever. The 俄 sound is nowhere in the original pronunciation, while the final syllable is left out completely. Yes, I know why it ended up transliterated that way, but if we apply the standards you set for katakana to Chinese transliterations you guys have to "update" it to reflect either the Russian spelling (something like 露西亞 or 羅西雅) or the actual modern standard Russian pronunciation (perhaps 拉西雅 or 拉西葉; and that's only based on the Mandarin pronunciations, I have no idea how I would have to write it to render it adequately in Cantonese).

Edit: Oh, and the ウイルス is actually based on the original Latin pronunciation of the word. In Classical Latin (as opposed to Late and Mediaeval Latin) the pronunciation of V was actually closer to the English W (in fact V and U were merely variants of the same letter) and, needless to say (hopefully), the I in Latin never had the English "aye" pronunciation.

If I had any authority on the matter I'd just encourage use of romaji instead of katakana for western foreign words, since everyone can read the roman alphabet more or less.

dizmox Wrote:If I had any authority on the matter I'd just encourage use of romaji instead of katakana for western foreign words, since everyone can read the roman alphabet more or less.

Why would people who don't even know katakana need to be able to read Japanese words?

I'd ban the katakana-ization of names, though.

@dizmox,vempele. Hmm, I'm not sure. Sometimes I see roman text in a book (written sideways at times) and it serves a different role in that context of showing something that is said and understood in English rather than a word that was incorporated from English into the Japanese language.

Sorry I meant names, not words. orz

I think every language does this. "Karate" and "karaoke" spring to my mind as some loan words which we do not pronounce the same as a Japanese person would. Karaoke is especially bad actually....I'm not even sure how it became "care -- ee -- oh -- key." Sometimes I want to say "anime" with an "a" like in "father", but to be honest when talking with English speakers it makes me sound pretentious or strange, so I tend to just use the English pronunciation. Same for "karate." That's just how those words are pronounced in English.

I don't see what the problem is. Kanji are the same, actually. They're not pronounced with the original Chinese pronunciation. Should kanji words be renovated so that Japanese people can learn to speak Chinese better?

tashippy Wrote:I agree with everything you said, sir/madam.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I know that native Chinese speakers often have difficulty with the voiced vs. unvoiced syllables in Japanese..

I'm not really familiar with the idea of voiced or unvoiced syllables. What does this mean? Thanks.

た vs. だ, か vs. が, etc

nothing like beating a dead horse, so I'll say what has already been said, only slighty worse. One of the main problems with katakana is that it is カタカナ and not katakana; 日本語 and not English. Learning vocab is a lot of remapping similar concepts to different words/expressions/sounds, and katakana words are no different. Sure, they may sound similar to English, or share similar origins, but if English speakers were consistent with this half of their English would be spoken French, and a mixture or Romance languages.