When I watch my japanese shows and movies, they occasionally say something in English. 90% of the time I don't catch what they say, and wouldn't have noticed it at all without subtitles. I was just wondering if that's something you can better understand when you learn their native tongue. Or if it's always hard to understand them in English if they aren't fluent in it.

I used to work with this guy, I think he was Korean though, but the same thing applies. This guy knew barely any English at all, but he would try to say things to me a lot, and the little English he did speak to me, I just could NOT decipher! I think one of the things I did hear once was "Be easy for you!" and I laughed and said "yeah", but most of the time I just had to shrug and shake my head, and he'd smile and nod. As if to say to each other "Oh well, guess we can't really communicate." It was kind of sad really..

Maybe it's the curse of living in plain-speaking America.

I think it gets easier as you become accustomed to the accent...

Hologen Wrote:When I watch my japanese shows and movies, they occasionally say something in English. 90% of the time I don't catch what they say, and wouldn't have noticed it at all without subtitles. I was just wondering if that's something you can better understand when you learn their native tongue. Or if it's always hard to understand them in English if they aren't fluent in it.

Are they speaking whole sentences in English or just individual words?

Because you might be mistaking loan words with an English origin with actual English words. Same origin =/= same language.

イフ　ユー　アンダースタンド　10%　ザット　イズ　ノット　バッド　アット　オール

愛羅武勇

Yeah, when you live in Japan and hear it all the time, it gets a lot easier. I had Japanese friends in college, then taught English for five years over here in Japan. Now it's quite easy to understand, but at first it wasn't at all.

Lack of experience talking to people with accents (other than your own).
Lack of experience talking to people with Japanese accents in particular.
Lack of experience talking to bilingual visible foreigners (and resulting stereotyping).
Lack of experience with codeswitching (using two languages at the same time).
Lack of English ability (the Japanese person)

#3 gets Japanese people all the time. Occasionally you can say something in perfect Japanese to a Japanese native but they'll have no idea what you said, because they weren't expecting you to speak Japanese. They basically didn't even listen to you because "ohshit ohshit ohshit" is going through their head as they dread the possibility of having to try to communicate in English.

Yeah, you get used to the accent after a while.

Still, my friends'll throw a random English word into a sentence and I'll try to parse it like its Japanese... almost always trips me up.

Haha, also what Jarvik said about #3 is so true. And a hilarious way of thinking about it.. heh.

It also helps that a large portion of the foreigners a Japanese person may talk to don't speak Japanese, thus the "oh shit!" mentality and not understanding perfect Japanese. If more foreigners spoke Japanese, it would happen less often.

This is why my friend who is a Japanese teacher told me that whenever he gets into a cab in Japan, he always starts with an あのぉぉ to get the cabbie into Japanese mode, else they often won't understand him as they are expecting English.

Womacks23 Wrote:Because you might be mistaking loan words with an English origin with actual English words. Same origin =/= same language.

I want to quote this to emphasize it -- contemporary Japanese contains a lot of loan words from Western languages (mostly English). Although some of them are slang, there are a large number of such loan words that are used in every style of Japanese, from casual speech to formal writing. However, it is very important to understand that these loan words are still Japanese, not English, and that you must pronounce the words as they are pronounced in Japanese. Otherwise, Japanese people who do not know English may not be able to understand what you are saying.

It's also an important skill to learn to read the katakana as Japanese, rather than having to decipher them to an English word before you can figure out what they say.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Lack of experience talking to people with accents (other than your own).
Lack of experience talking to people with Japanese accents in particular.
Lack of experience talking to bilingual visible foreigners (and resulting stereotyping).
Lack of experience with codeswitching (using two languages at the same time).
Lack of English ability (the Japanese person)

#3 gets Japanese people all the time. Occasionally you can say something in perfect Japanese to a Japanese native but they'll have no idea what you said, because they weren't expecting you to speak Japanese. They basically didn't even listen to you because "ohshit ohshit ohshit" is going through their head as they dread the possibility of having to try to communicate in English.

OH jeeze, that one kills me. A friend came to visit me and the first restaurant we went to in Osaka the waitress I called over did that. I repeated myself and tried asking a couple different ways. She finally called another waitress over and I repeated myself yet again. She turned to her coworker, looked at her like she was an idiot, and informed her I was asking for water.

Often I think that's a pronunciation problem. If your pronunciation is fairly good, you should find that a lot of Japanese people are able to understand you immediately, and most of the rest will have no trouble once they get past the initial "OMG it's a gaijin speaking Japanese!" shock.

Unfortunately I think we may have to work harder at pronunciation than people would in other languages because of what Jarvik7 said; many Japanese people (especially outside of big cities) have little or no experience hearing foreign accented Japanese.

(This also tends to be a problem because people get in the mindset that Japanese pronunciation is simple and then completely neglect practicing it, or they believe that if they have learned the hiragana, they know how to pronounce Japanese.)

Not to mention that pronounciation guides in textbooks and so on tend to use really dodgy choices of English words to demonstrate hiragana pronounciation. And not just ふ、し、ん etc, they tend to describe the vowels wrong too. Once your pronunciation improves, you'll realise just how bad the newb English gaijin accent is.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Often I think that's a pronunciation problem. If your pronunciation is fairly good, you should find that a lot of Japanese people are able to understand you immediately, and most of the rest will have no trouble once they get past the initial "OMG it's a gaijin speaking Japanese!" shock.

I wouldn't say that's the problem 100% of the time. I was in a video game store with a Japanese friend not too long ago, and I was checking out and the guy was trying to tell me I needed something I already had, but in bad English. I only knew what he was saying because of his hand motions. So, I answered him in Japanese to let him know I already had that piece and understood. He continued. After the third run through, he finally got it and it seemed to dawn on him I could use Japanese. After the incident on the way out, I asked my Japanese friend (in English as to not offend the shopkeep who was still in earshot) whether or not my pronunciation or word choice during any time was weird or anything but native-sounding. He said absolutely not. And this is the friend who will stop me mid-sentence if I screw up.

So, I am completely convinced that what Jarvik says is true. They have this incredible back and forth of "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit" (Or I guess, "しまった、しまった、しまった”) going on in the back of their head and they don't actually notice you are speaking Japanese. I know I kind of subconsciously experience this when meeting people as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm bad with names, so I think I'm bad with names, so when I meet someone and introductions are going on, I'm too busying thinking "remember their name, remember their name" that I don't even hear it.

I'm not a native speaker of English and I'm used to talk to other non-native speakers in English, so I'm used to somewhat bad English, but some Japanese people's English really gives me a headache!!!
Especially when they try to use it in situations when it's important that I understand them and I've proven that my Japanese level is good enough so that there's no need for English.
Just happened this week when I went to the hospital for a cancer check-up. One of the docs wanted to try out his English on me and I ended up not understanding most of his questions - while I didn't have any problem with the other docs who talked Japanese to me.
Bleh :/

I'm not trying to be an a-hole or anything but, I gotta aggree with yudantaiteki on this one. If your pronunciation is perfect you will not have this problem. My accent is far from perfect but I never have this problem anymore. The Japanese native speaker can not help but process natural Japanese. They need only hear one or two words and their brain will automatically start parsing it whether they want to or not. I imagine it's the same for all of us with our native language. I couldn't not understand well pronounced english even if I tried. Ever heard of the Stroop effect
The thing is you may think your pronounciation is perfect, you're pronouncing all the kana correctly, but your intonation, pitch, speed and even word choice could still be way off or exibiting the signs of English speech that will trigger the listener to think you're still speaking English. I've experienced this before myself when hearing people speaking english together in the background in a thick accent. It can take a while for the brain to click onto the fact that they are even speaking English, because the accent is so thick.

You fail to appreciate how strong the foreigner stereotype is in Japan, and just how nervous many Japanese people get when thrust into a situation with one. However, I did say occasionally. If it's happening to you everyday then it might be time to point the finger at oneself.

Exactly.

There is a rather large part of the Japanese population who get very uncomfortable when they see a foreigner speaking Japanese.

nadiatims Wrote:I'm not trying to be an a-hole or anything but, I gotta aggree with yudantaiteki on this one. If your pronunciation is perfect you will not have this problem. My accent is far from perfect but I never have this problem anymore. The Japanese native speaker can not help but process natural Japanese. They need only hear one or two words and their brain will automatically start parsing it whether they want to or not. I imagine it's the same for all of us with our native language. I couldn't not understand well pronounced english even if I tried. Ever heard of the Stroop effect
The thing is you may think your pronounciation is perfect, you're pronouncing all the kana correctly, but your intonation, pitch, speed and even word choice could still be way off or exibiting the signs of English speech that will trigger the listener to think you're still speaking English. I've experienced this before myself when hearing people speaking english together in the background in a thick accent. It can take a while for the brain to click onto the fact that they are even speaking English, because the accent is so thick.

Oh man that happened to me, I thought someone was speaking to me in japanese but or at least heard some random phrases in japanese coming from them. But they were just speaking in English all along lol.

Womacks23 Wrote:Exactly.

There is a rather large part of the Japanese population who get very uncomfortable when they see a foreigner speaking Japanese.

That is not very comforting to us. I don't want to make any one feel uncomfortable or nervous just at the thought of having to speak with me!

Womacks23 Wrote:Exactly.

There is a rather large part of the Japanese population who get very uncomfortable when they see a foreigner speaking Japanese.

Would be even more surprised to see a fluent foreigner speaking Japanese.

Womacks23 Wrote:愛羅武勇

誰だっけ？

Hologen Wrote:

Womacks23 Wrote:Exactly.

There is a rather large part of the Japanese population who get very uncomfortable when they see a foreigner speaking Japanese.

That is not very comforting to us. I don't want to make any one feel uncomfortable or nervous just at the thought of having to speak with me!

I can't remember anyone being uncomfortable with me speaking Japanese. The reason some people get nervous at the sight of a foreigner is because they think they're gonna have to speak the English they learnt at school however many years ago.

When they realise you can speak some Japanese they're usually relieved. Unless they're a university baito staff who are like damn I wanna use my English.

nadiatims Wrote:I'm not trying to be an a-hole or anything but, I gotta aggree with yudantaiteki on this one. If your pronunciation is perfect you will not have this problem. My accent is far from perfect but I never have this problem anymore.

I'm throwing in with yudaintaiteki as well. Before coming to Japan I did three years of an all-speaking program that REALLY stressed pronunciation. Now I've lived in Japan for more than two years, and nobody has ever misunderstood me at first thanks to expectation.

My first four months I lived in Shiga, and in that town everyone expected you to be able to speak Japanese (being that the vast majority of foreigners in the town were at the Japanese language school). But even not including that, I've lived in Kyoto for just under two years. Everyone treats you like an idiot tourist here, but still, nobody has misunderstood me in that way.

I'll grant that it could be possible in very small doses. I'd say that maybe 1% of the time you're misunderstood at first it could be because the person was completely not expecting it. But, the other 99% of the time you're misunderstood, it's because you're making pronunciation mistakes.

Granted, I suppose I only really know for Osaka, Kyoto, and a couple of cities in Shiga. I make no claims for anywhere else.

Edit: (There could be other things at play here. For example, I very often use hesitation noises when I start to speak, especially at first to get the persons attention. So I say something like えっとですね. Perhaps this gives people enough time to realize that I'll be speaking Japanese)

Well, I think the main exception is when you first talk to someone. If the Japanese person doesn't understand your initial Japanese, it can very well be surprise or discomfort at talking to a foreigner, not your pronunciation.