This may be something we all run into, or maybe it's just me...

but how on earth do you learn to understand and learn and most importantly, SAY Katakana words as Katakana, and not english?

When I see Katakana, even if I've seen it a million times before, I instantly translate it to English in my head. I'm proud that I don't need to do it for hiragana and Kanji words but katakana... jeez.

For instance... when I see 'アドベンちゃー' I don't just know it, I think in my mind 'hmm... アドベンチャー。。。 sounds like ADVENTURE!"

Then when I say it in Japanese, I say something along the lines of "Ad-vencha" instead of "adobenchya". Anyway it totally doesn't sound Japanese to me.

How do I kick this terrible habit... how do I learn Katakana words not as English but as Japanese... -_- I feel like a fool saying "California" and the Japanese poeple going "huh?? you mean カりフォルニア??

Maybe you know English is a stress-timed language, while Japanese is a syllable-timed language. As an English speaker, you're brain isn't trained to separate the syllables like the Japanese do.

So my advice would be: practice. Try to speak like a robot: find long words/sentences and try to put stress on every syllable. It's exhausting at first, but saying these words right makes one feel like "really" speaking Japanese.

You'll note that it's not specific to katakana written words by the way. But the problem is emphasised there because we tend to pronounce them like English. And what really bugs me is that (in Japanese) it's a phonetic transcription (of the English words) and not a phonemic one, and I always get the (カタカナ) spelling wrong. :angry:

When you say talk like a robot this is what pops into my head.

I'd say shadow some stuff as well.

The way I've gotten better at this is by adding katakana cards to my sentence deck. It forces me to make the translation in my head and produce the katakana correctly. So my card looks something like this:

Front

カタカナで：hiking

Back

ハイキング　haikingu


That's it. It's pretty simple but very effective. I add the romaji as well because it helps me learn how to pronounce it much much easier than the katakana, but when I'm scoring myself I base it on if I produced the correct katakana or not. There are a few hard ones that are spelled differently even though they come from the same English word e.g.,

necklace ネックレス

necktie 　ネクタイ

doing this in anki or whatever will eventually help you make differences like this a little bit easier. But it's still confusing. Now I know how french people feel about English.

Reading. Lots and lots of reading.

At least, that worked for me.

As a kind of protest against the silliness of many katakanaised words I pronounce them just as I do in my native accent.

Can you "convert" words yourself? Like if one of your English-speaking friends asked what their name was in Japanese or something. I can't explain exactly how you do it, but I think developing this ability will solve a lot of your problems.

Names could be a good way to practise. Try converting some celebrity names and then googling them to see if you're right. You could try going on Jim Breem's dictionary and shadowing the longer words too.

Sometimes it can be funny to use カタカナ like ナイストゥミートユー or something. Occasionally when I can't think of a word, I'll try the カタカナed English and it gets through more often than not, so it is worth learning.

bucko Wrote:As a kind of protest against the silliness of many katakanaised words I pronounce them just as I do in my native accent.

インコンプレヘンシブリー？

Practice saying katakana words you hear in recordings.

Also, when a Japanese person says a katakana word you've never heard before, ask them to repeat it a couple of times, and then repeat it yourself. They'll probably find this more endearing than annoying, if you pull it off with some charm.

I think the solution might just be more listening. Basically get used to how Japanese people say these words and eventually they'll stick. As your listening improves, it will gradually improve your accent without too much effort.

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nadiatims Wrote:I think the solution might just be more listening. Basically get used to how Japanese people say these words and eventually they'll stick. As your listening improves, it will gradually improve your accent without too much effort.

I used to have the same problem, and the solution really was listening. Listening (read: singing along) to music (b/c the words get dragged out, and there's no way you'd put it back together as English), and listening to variety shows (or any where they talk like that; Music Station works, and you get subtitled lyrics!) is the best, imo.

If the stuff you listen to doesn't have enough katakana and you want more concentrated practice, what about cards (like BizarroJosh's) with audio to immediately compare your pronunciation?

hiking => ハイキング+audio (ideally clickable to test your conversion first)
audio => ハイキング + hiking (hidden)

If you leave out romaji or hiragana, you'll improve your katakana reading at the same time. 2 birds...

I wonder how many katakana words in Edict have audio? The Leeds corpus vocab list includes about 1000 common written katakana words. (pm me if you want them.) With Anki, you could sift through some of those for practice, linking the audio as you go (one button). SRSing them (all) would be overkill. You'd also learn some unrecognizable words.

I think maybe what's more annoying than pronouncing katakana words is interference from English and when katakana words have different meanings than their English equivalents.

I always slip up on カリフォルニア　and マクドナルド (it always seems to be those long katakana words) because for some reason I recall the English pronunciation immediately after hearing these words, and then I become confused and kind of mish-mash the two pronunciations together.

Then there's the case of katakana words with meanings that differ from their English counterparts. The best example that comes to mind is バイキング which refers to an all-you-can-eat buffet. I was at an actual all-you-can-eat buffet at a ryokan (Japanese-style hotel) the first time I saw this word. I could not control my laughter. In my head, I recalled images of vikings pillaging villages, kidnapping women, and eating whatever food in sight with their bare hands... oh! and this commercial. The fact that a loanword which connotes and conjures up images of "barbarians" had become standard Japanese for an all-you-can-eat buffet only added to the hilarity. At any rate, everyone I was eating with was entirely confused by my laughter until I explained it to them.

bucko Wrote:As a kind of protest against the silliness of many katakanaised words I pronounce them just as I do in my native accent.

This is a bad idea. Native speakers of Japanese who are not good at English will often have no idea what you're trying to say.

vileru Wrote:バイキング

To me it sounds like biking, which is also wrong.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

bucko Wrote:As a kind of protest against the silliness of many katakanaised words I pronounce them just as I do in my native accent.

This is a bad idea. Native speakers of Japanese who are not good at English will often have no idea what you're trying to say.

I do this all the time. After a long day in Tokyo sometimes I just don't feel like butchering my language and my katakana words trail off into english if they are longer than a few mora.

One night I was with a friend of mine and we were looking for redbull at a convenience store. I asked for it in Japanese but probably said レッドbull. There was confusion and I repeated myself about 3 times, making the rest of my sentence clearer and slower.　I was starting to think that they didn't carry it and was about to give up. Finally my friend (who didn't know a whole lot of words but was better at communicating) yelled across the store REDDO BURU in perfect katakana pronunciation and the clerk instantly directed us to it.

:lol:

I treat katakana words as Japanese words that sound 'maybe similar' to English.

I mean, you probably wouldn't understand a thing a foreigner was saying if they pronounced all the words in English that came from their languages with their "correct" pronunciations.

This is the reason they have katakana-word specific books -- for all you people who think katakana is just "mangled English."

Edict does have audio for all the examples on this thread so far, plus some others I tried.

For some reason it had never occurred to me use Edict for katakana words. I'll be glad to have another source for finding out what they mean. I can always pronounce them when I read them, but they're often so tortured, especially when they have a lot of extra vowels, that I can't figure out what they represent. And then there're words like バイキング - I didn't get that one, even with the all-you-can-eat clue, until I put it into Edict and saw smorgasbord.

One thing I'm pretty sure of is that I'll never be able to pronounce マクドナルド correctly.

Asriel Wrote:I treat katakana words as Japanese words that sound 'maybe similar' to English.

This is what I do.


Also it's good to be careful of Japanese words we say in English like karaoke, sumo, sushi etc. The kids at my schools think the English pronunciations are hilarious

One other thing that can be useful is to get used to the fairly fixed rules that govern how English words are represented in katakana. That allows you to see simultaneously マクドナルド and McDonald.

Related: Why do Japanese people use "English" words when there are perfectly good Japanese words that say the same thing?

Are there really no Japanese words for "positive thinking" or "teamwork"? Is the best way to communicate these concepts (in Japanese) really to just use "English"?

Many of the "English" words are so badly mangled so as to be unrecognizable to an English speaker. For example conbini or depaato. Positive thinking and teamwork are not like this - they sound almost exactly like their English counterparts when used in everyday speech.

I posted this on another non-Japanese language learning forum:
Stalker in Japanese: STALKER. Seriously. Don't believe me? Your loss. <-- Note: That says "sutookaa" in katakana.

What!? Why do I know that!? *sigh* Yeah, I've been watching too much of the wrong kind of anime lately.
---------
A guy replied to that and said it'd be weird if there wasn't a native word for stalker before they borrowed one.

zachandhobbes Wrote:How do I kick this terrible habit... how do I learn Katakana words not as English but as Japanese... -_- I feel like a fool saying "California" and the Japanese poeple going "huh?? you mean カりフォルニア??

You're *from* California, and they think they can correct you on how to say "California"?? I mean, I have a French colleague, and when she talks about "Pah-ree", I sure don't correct her and say, "Hey, it's called 'Pare-ess', get it right."

yudantaiteki Wrote:One other thing that can be useful is to get used to the fairly fixed rules that govern how English words are represented in katakana. That allows you to see simultaneously マクドナルド and McDonald.

I remember noticing a book that goes over these rules while at Kinokinuya a few months ago. Most of the rules are fairly obvious and can inferred no problem. However, I remember reading about a few that are less frequently used or not so obvious, and I think it'd be worthwhile to brush up on those. Is there any online list where I can find a collection of these fixed rules?

jcdietz03 Wrote:Related: Why do Japanese people use "English" words when there are perfectly good Japanese words that say the same thing?

Are there really no Japanese words for "positive thinking" or "teamwork"? Is the best way to communicate these concepts (in Japanese) really to just use "English"?

I guess that's just their modus operandi. C'est la vie.