Won't Miss #413 - cutting/adding sounds

Sometimes I have to really reach for a picture, especially when I'm talking about sounds. So, we have this extremely tenuous connection here. 

One correction I've made to students' English about a million times by now is the addition of an "a" at the end of the word "salad". This is because Japanese, with a few exceptions, operates with consonant vowel pairs (e.g., ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, but not just "k") and salad is pronounced as "salada" in Japan. Prying the added sounds off the end of an English word that has been adapted to suit Japanese pronunciation is close to impossible (shirt and suit, are similarly difficult as they are perma-pluralized in Japanese as "shatsu" and "suitsu").

This side of the puzzle wouldn't bother me so much except that the Japanese seem perfectly capable of truncating these sounds of their own volition when it suits them. There's a department store called "Seibu" (pronounced "say-boo") which they almost always refer to as "Seib" (sabe). I've also heard people say "Shinjuk" for "Shinjuku".  It's a small thing (but did you actually expect 1000 big things about Japan?), but it annoys me that I can't get them to chop off sounds where necessary when speaking English, but they are capable of doing so in their own language when it isn't.

I won't miss this linguistic inconsistency. 

Will Miss #193 - sound translation mistakes

When I first started working in Japan, I worked in Ikebukuro not too far from a large building called "Sunshine City". One of my earliest experiences with the sound translation problems from Japanese to English came when students talked about this building in lessons. In Japanese, "si" and "shi" are often used interchangeably so people would say, "Sunshine Shitty". I never laughed when the students said this as it would have been rude, but I always smiled inside because, frankly, it's funny. It's not funny because they're speaking incorrectly as their errors are natural and understandable, but because it's a strange word combination. Another pronunciation problem which was especially amusing included a student saying "fact" as "fucked" (because a/u are a sound problem from Japanese to English). I also once got an obscene call from someone who knew I was a foreigner who said, "fack, fack, fack" instead of "fuck, fuck, fuck." That was by far the funniest because he meant to intimidate me, but I just laughed because he spoke so incompetently that I barely registered his intent before he gave up and hung up the phone.

I'll miss these unexpected, yet amusing mistakes that arise from the differences in how sounds are pronounced in Japanese and English.