Fun With Engrish, Part 1 - by Philip

It’s time for me to make a confession that’s been weighing on my mind for a while now: I suck at Japanese. Okay, that probably doesn’t seem like something to be ashamed of, but I spent five years in Japan and could have taken much better advantage of the opportunity to learn the language while I was there. The only kanji characters that I learned how to read were the sumo wrestlers’ names, which were no help at all when asking for directions to the train station. For example, how many times do you get to say, “Little Brocade,” “Young Donkey” or “Morning Victory Dragon” in everyday conversation? Well, I actually try to work them in a lot, but that usually just makes me sound creepy.

Fortunately, I have a good excuse. Wait, I actually have two good excuses. One is that I have never cared about learning Japanese. Being congenitally lazy, all I really wanted to know how to say in Japanese was, “I don’t speak Japanese.” Other than that, I could have gotten by with just pointing and grunting. Most Japanese men communicate like that all the time anyway, so people might have thought that I was really trying to fit in.



My other excuse is that I didn’t start learning Japanese until I was in my twenties. Researchers have shown that people who study a language before the age of 12 learn it in the brain’s language center like native speakers, whereas people who study languages later in life learn it in the part of the brain that makes everything they say sound like they’re imitating Arnold Schwarzenegger. (BTW, before becoming the governor of a state, shouldn’t you have to be able to pronounce the name of that state? I’m pretty sure that I don’t live in a place called “kuh-lee-föhn-ya.”) I have such an extreme American accent that I now punish my daughters (both of whom are American, but studied some Japanese before age 12) by speaking Japanese in front of them. Judging by how they react when I do this, my accent might be even worse than the Governator’s.

But all false humility and teasing of Austrians aside, I did take a Japanese skill test while I was in Japan and just 6-8 weeks later I received a certificate that actually said, “Philip Dyer can speak Japanese at the level of a 5-year-old.” That was one of the proudest days of my life, because I have always assumed that I also speak English at about that same level. If everyone in the world spoke some Esperanto-like universal language at a 5-year-old’s level, we would be so much better off. “Me no want you point nuclear boom boom at me. Me give you favorite Spiderman sticker and you point boom boom other way.” (Note that even 5-year-olds pronounce "nuclear" better than President Bush.) Think of how much we could accomplish if all the people of the world could communicate with anyone they want at that level. More importantly, think of how much more interesting United Nations Security Council meetings would be.

While living in Japan, one of my favorite pastimes was to seek out all of the hilarious attempts at English that could be found in abundance at every restaurant, t-shirt store and junior high school. But, as you can imagine, my kindergarten-level Japanese resulted in quite a number of misunderstandings that my former co-workers probably still laugh about as they recall them over family dinners. Check back for the next posting to see some examples of the really, really stupid things that I said while I was there.