Japanese English

(this photo was taken in San Francisco, not Japan)

Not sure if you know this, but there is a fair bit of English in Japanese, although when uttered we may not always know it because it may not sound like English. More amazingly, a few words that I thought were Taiwanese (a dialect of Mandarin Chinese) turned out to be Japanese, which in turn were derived from English!

How the heck did this happen, you may ask. The Japanese occupied Taiwan for 100 years before the Nationalist Party took over after World War II. During their occupation, Japanese was the official language and it was taught in schools during my grandparents' time. From exposure to the West and rapid modernization, a number of English words made it into the Japanese lexicon. Words such as radio, coat (pronounced coh-toh), names for newfangled items that were never before seen in the East and for which there were no names in Japanese, were adapted from English names and became so ingrained into Japanese culture that it was disseminated as part of the Japanese spoken in colonial Taiwan.

Two of my Japanese friends love to teach me Japanese English, and we giggle uproariously as we exchange pronunciations. Oftentimes, stressing the syllables slightly differently and/or removing the "u" or "o" sound added at the end of the word will give you the original English word. Here are just a few:

sebu-m-elebu = seven-eleven (7-11)
stah-baku-ss = Starbucks
maku-donaduno = McDonald's
beginah-zi-lahku = beginner's luck