Comments on: Gairaigo: help or hindrance?

By: Alex Case

Alex Case — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 06:53:42 +0000

One I just learnt from NHK (surprisingly up with new language for a stuffy government-owned broadcaster) is arafo (short for around forty). As I tell my students, it’s incredibly creative and I wish we did have that expression in English, but with this one (it’s not always the case) no one outside Japan will understand you if you say it. Tackling this point can make students incredibly self-conscious about making mistakes and doubt that any words in Japanese can also be used in English (the vast majority have the same meaning- if sometimes more restricted and with changed pron), so my attitude is similar to Jan’s and I tell them it is correct- just correct Japanese rather than correct English. I don’t think using the expression “Japanese English” has an effect, though, because the vast majority of Japanese have never heard this expression, and sometimes not even wasei eigo, the closest Japanese expression (just used for Japanese expressions made from English words, like Walkman).

Arubaito is not exactly the same as paato, being the same kind of contract but used for different kinds of people.

By: Jan Visscher

Jan Visscher — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:30:24 +0000

Gairaigo is indeed, as many have discovered, often creative and inventive. A prime, fairly recent, example, is “chakumero”, which combines “chaku”, the Japanese term meaning “arrival” (but used only in combination with other Chinese character-derived terms) and the first two syllables of “melody”, with the flapped /r/ replacing the original /l/.
Hence “arrival melody” or ring tone! However, gairaigo often created problems for Japanese learners of English because such terms as “guts pose” (see Darren’s comment of March 3rd) and the notorious “mansion” for condominium or apartment block are usually designated as “Japanese English”. This is totally misleading. Unlike some Indian and Philippine English terms that I’ve heard, gairaigo is used as part of Japanese, not English, discourse. In other words, it is Japanese and should be recognized as such. By acknowledging, silently or otherwise, the existence of “Japanese English”, with the implication that it is related to and therefore usable in English, Japanese speakers of English are unaware of the problems the use of such terms creates in English discourse. These range from shopping for a “waishatsu” (white shirt = dress shirt) in a New York department store and meeting understandably blank faces to misunderstanding at the garage stemming from the use of “handeru” (handle) for steering wheel.
Since gairaigo is nearly always written in katakana (although katakana is not used exclusively for gairaigo), I suggest that teachers of English can do their students a great service by raising their awareness of the pitfalls presented by gairaigo. Second, I suggest that “Japanese English” be replaced by “gairainihongo” to emphasize that these terms are mostly understandable only in a Japanese context or cotext as well as to cover terms coming from other languages (see Darren’s comment of March 3rd). Interesting point: the term “arubaito” for part-time job is often replaced with “paato” (part), so-called Japanese English, but in this sense of course 100% Japanese or “gairainihongo”.

By: AllaSobirova

AllaSobirova — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 06:25:03 +0000

Wow!That was very interesting! I gave it to read to my neighbour-heis the teacher of Japanese and he asked me to give him all new materials from your blog.

By: Leo Yoffe

Leo Yoffe — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:30:49 +0000

An interesting post. I am actually quite grateful to gairaigo for alleviating the need to learn and memorize even more kanji compounds, a process which would surely become neccesary in the light of all the new vocabulary coming into daily use, if the neologisms could not be expressed via katakana, no matter how twisted. As most of you know, kanji are used exclusively in Chinese, and the cognitive energy required to remember all the new entries into the language can be mich more effectively applied towards other, more meaningful pursuits.

By: Jussara Simões

Jussara Simões — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:01:15 +0000

Lovely reading! I can see English is giving a hard time to people all over the world!
Domo arigato!

By: Darren

Darren — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 07:26:58 +0000

The difficulty for Japanese learners of English is the katakana ‘false friend’. Many loanwords are not English, so we get アルバイト (arubaito) which comes from the German word for ‘work’, and means ‘part-time job’. There are also words which are based in English, but mean something very different… or nothing at all. Examples of this type are ペーパドライバー (pe-pa doraiba, paper driver), indicating someone who has a license but doesn’t drive, and ガッツポーズ (gattsu po-zu, guts pose) which is a kind of victorious fist pump.

Fun though, and often very inventive.

By: Kati Sule

Kati Sule — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:21:57 +0000

Your post takes me back a few years when I decided to learn Japanese. Having 'mastered' hiragana and katakana I moved on to kanji with great enthusiasm only to realise it was going to take me quite a great deal more time than the first two sets of characters. I stopped after the first dozen of simple kanji and decided I'd continue after I've retired. A couple of years later I was very surprised to find that I still could understand quite a bit of spoken Japanese. Interestingly, my Japanese teacher also said that Hungarian (my mother tongue) was much closer to Japanese in terms of grammar than English. I also found that in terms of phonology Hungarian and Japanese were quite similar to each other. With regards gairaigo my personal experience is that the bigger the difference between the borrowing and lending languages, the more 'awkward' the loanwords become. English terms in Hungarian sound so much more 'alien' than in Dutch for example. Hungarian fájl, a transliteration of English file, still sounds foreign to my ears (it's been around ever since Windows was translated into Hungarian) but the Dutch borrowings metroseksueel and blogosfeer don't.