I wrote last time that one of the challenges of living in Japan is getting accustomed to Japanese-accented English, sometimes called katakana English because of the way it’s filtered through the syllable-based phonetic structure of Japanese. Back in high school, I listened to the old-school Macross song “0-G Love” for more than a year before it it dawned on me that the phrase was English — the unfamilar pronunciation confused me enough that I wasn’t even able to identify it as my own language. Of course, everyone has an accent when speaking another language, including me, and I might have similar challenges understanding the local English whether I was in Japan or China or Jamaica. Part of the probem is, the special nature of Japanese phonology makes words that are a single syllable to us (like “truck”) into three when spoken by a Japanese person (torakku, pronounced to-RAH-kkoo). Some other vocal concepts we take for granted need to be remapped into sounds that exist in Japanese, which is why “where” sounds like “oo-eh-AH” and “twins” comes out like “tsoo-EE-nzoo,” which can take a while to get used to. Then there are words that are used differently here, even though they’re ostensibly English, like VIP and UFO, which are pronounced as “veep” and “you-fo.”
