How Japanese People speak English | Japanese Accent explained

What’s the reason behind “Japanese English”? Find out! Za warudo toki wo tomare!

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Have you ever wondered why Japanese speaking English sometimes sound a little strange? Wife becomes waifu, thank you becomes sankyu and hot dog becomes hotto doggu and gets its own song on youtube with 15 million views.
I mean sure, every non-native speaker has an accent, as you can probably tell im from Germany so I’m a certified expert in strange sounding English but there’s actually a deeper reason behind Japanese English.
And that is the Japanese writing system. You see, The Japanese language relies on not one but three different alphabets — hiragana, katakana and kanji.

Hiragana is used for simple Japanese word and grammatical structures, kanji is used to represents an abstract concept, general word, or name and katakana is used to write foreign loan words and sounds. Here’s where it gets interesting.

If we take a closer look at the katakana or at the Japanese language in general, we see that Japanese has what you could describe as a consonant vowal structure – almost all the time a consonant is followed by a vowal. There are only a few exceptions where you can use a consonant or a vowel on its own.

When students learn a new language, its only natural to transcribe the sound of the foreign word in their own writing system at the beginning, right? So let’s take a look at the word strawberry. How would you do that? Well you start with an “s” but you quickly realize there is no “s”, so you take “su” since its sounds more or less the same. Next up is “t”, except there is no “t”, so you take “to”. R? Nope, but there is ra which is fine. Be and ri is also possible, so the finished word is sutoraberi. Now that doesn’t sound to bad, but there are words where it gets a little more problematic.
Take the word “sit”. There is no “si” katakana, but there is “shi” and then you could also take to. That’s why sit sometimes sounds like something else with a Japanese accent.

If you learn the English pronounciation like this from a young age, it can be quiet hard to get rid of it – sometimes Japanese can’t help but put an extra vowal behind a consonant.

What’s also interesting is that Japanese sometimes put a unique twist on a word. The word “tension” normally means “mental or emotional strain” but in Japan “Im super high tension” refers to being excited or in a great mood”
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