One thing I find fascinating is that a large fraction of the Japanese language is made up of loanwords, I’ve heard about ten percent of their language being of English origin. But they take our words and adapt them to their syllabic structure, making them Japanese words. Most English speakers wouldn’t even understand them. There’s a hilarious music video called “Japanglish” that makes fun of that, and I still can’t hear “ma-ko-do-ru-no-DO” without laughing to myself.
English has very few loanwords from Japanese. There are a few, “skosh”, from “sukoshi”, meaning “little,” was one that surprised me, but the list is actually very small. We have not borrowed many words from Japanese – and the ones we have are more because we seem to think they’re cute than anything else. I hear “nani” has become a popular word in some circles.
But the point of this post is this: We mispronounce the Japanese words. Many people pronounce “Kawaii” as they would “Hawaii”, when it’s more properly pronounced as “ka-wa-ii”. “Karate” is pronounced by many with a long “e”, but it’s actually pronounced ka-ra-te”. Unfortunately that seems to only be done by pretentious people. “Karaoke” is not “carry-okie”, but “ka-ra-o-ke”. We even mispronounce “Toyota”. It’s “to-yo-ta”, not “toy-ota”.
But after some thought, I decided I don’t care. If nearly all of the English words that the Japanese have borrowed from us are said in a way that we can’t understand, I think it’s perfectly fair that we get to make some of their words our own.
If they don’t like it, they can learn how to pronounce “McDonald’s”. Then we’ll talk.
As for me, though, I’m probably going to pronounce them correctly. I’m trying to train myself to pronounce words the same way a Japanese person would. It’s actually more difficult than it sounds, because we tend to accent certain syllables, where there is no such thing in Japanese. For example, in English, “content” means two different things that depend on which syllable is stressed. But Japanese has no such thing, and stressing the syllables actually leads to mispronouncing because that makes us tend to use vowel sounds that Japanese people don’t actually have.
All this to say, if you borrow a word from a language and make it yours, fine. But if you want the speakers of the other language to understand you, best to learn how to pronounce it properly.