Japanese English (Don't use it!)

[Nulambda]

sign -- You ask a person for their signature, or you ask them to sign something. If you ask them for their sign they won't know what you are talking about. They will think of a sign, such as a stop sign or a store sign.

Actually, when you as someone that they'll think you're hitting on them (flirting). It's actually pretty rude to a lot of people.

 

[johnnyG]

...
... manufactured vocabulary is irksome and it causes confusion. That is what I preach and that is what I practice.

So you preach and practice manufactured vocabulary since it is irksome and causes confusion?!?!?

 

[Nulambda]

So you preach and practice manufactured vocabulary since it is irksome and causes confusion?!?!?

lol

I don't think that's what he meant.

 

[Mark of Zorro]

...it is irksome and causes confusion...

Exactly. Thank you for saying that.

 

[Mark of Zorro]

dump car -- Its either a dump truck or a dumper. If you say "dump car" I think most Americans at least would think you were talking about a car that was destroyed beyond use or a car in a junkyard, as a place where garbage is amassed is called a dump.

apart -- apart means "separate from". A space in a building that people rent to live in is called an apartment. You cannot shorten it.

bike -- Usually this means bicycle. It can mean motorcycle, but that is slang and only used when the listener(s) know you are talking about a motorcycle. If you begin a conversation with "bike" everyone will think you mean bicycle, unless you are wearing motorcycle boots and a motorcycle helmet or at least near a motorcycle.

front glass -- windscreen or windshield

front hair -- bangs. Otherwise, we might think you are talking about your chest or pubic hair.

 

[Mike Cash]

Do you know the difference between "truck" and "lorry" in Japan? Have you ever heard of a "carrier car"?

 

[Mark of Zorro]

Why ask? Just post the information. About the only use of lorry I have heard in Japan is tank lorry which Americans would call a tanker truck. And I never heard of a carrier car, but just car carriers.

 

[Mike Cash]

Why ask? Just post the information. About the only use of lorry I have heard in Japan is tank lorry which Americans would call a tanker truck. And I never heard of a carrier car, but just car carriers.

Just making conversation.

"Carrier car" is Japanese English for "car carrier". It used to bug me a bit back when I drove one and had to hear it on a regular basis.

 

[nice gaijin]

my old go-to example of vocabulary culture shock was the use of "mansion" as a generally accepted euphemism for "shoebox"

 

[Mike Cash]

my old go-to example of vocabulary culture shock was the use of "mansion" as a generally accepted euphemism for "shoebox"

The size of housing inspired my first ever 駄洒落:

お狭いはどこですか？

 

[Mike Cash]

I encountered a new one today. New for me, anyway.

I'd like to have some milk for use at work, but prices from convenience stores are high and without refrigeration available in my truck bringing milk from home isn't an option. Canned condensed milk has to be refrigerated after opening so that was also out.

I called my wife and asked if there was powdered milk available in Japan, explaining to her why I wanted it and the refrigeration problem. She said there is no powdered milk in Japan and suggested I use"skim milk" instead.

I pointed out that skim milk would also require refrigeration. She said it wouldn't. A long discussion then ensued regarding the nature of "skim milk" and why I hate 外来語 (vocabulary borrowed from other languages).

It turns out that in Japan "skim milk" is "powdered milk". Sure enough, search for スキムミルク and what you're going to find is nothing but powdered milk products, typically with the milk fat removed. I had her do a Google image search on "skim milk" so she could see in English it always refers to a liquid product.

I had always thought that English "skim milk" or low-fat milk was in Japanese 低脂肪牛乳, which was a vocabulary item I picked up by just reading the carton. I guess they couldn't call it スキムミルク even if they had wanted to, as that name had already been taken, apparently in the years immediately after the war when lots of powdered milk was shipped here as relief supplies.

 

[Mike Cash]

I just stopped at a 24hr supermarket and bought some スキムミルク

Here's the bang-your-head-against-the-wall part, on the back:

 

[Kamille]

This is a difficult topic. Not sure all your examples aren't actually "false friends" instead of "bad English". There's a part of etymology when it comes to discriminating between the two. If you can prove that the word was at the beginning well understood and used in the same way in both languages and then just ended up walking different paths in both languages, then it's a false friend, and no matter how wrong it may sound in English, it's not English anymore and it's correct Japanese.

French and English have a whole history of borrowing from one another. Quite a bunch of words then evolved in different ways in both languages (and it's even more noticeable between French and Spanish, for example). That doesn't make them wrong. What matters is that they were well understood in the first place and then walked different paths afterwards.

Now I agree that it looks like most of these words you're talking about weren't correctly understood in the first place. I'm just not sure it applies for each one of them and you probably want to be careful when calling them "bad English".

 

[lanthas]

Since this topic is in the "Learning English" forum, it's actually quite easy. If you use the loanword as a real word, that is, describe powdered milk as "skim milk" when speaking English, then that's bad English regardless of whether the meanings of the real word and the loanword originally matched or not.

 

[Mike Cash]

Japanese people can use loan words amongst themselves any way they want to; it is a non-issue. The problem is the "false friend" issue that affects speakers of the language of origin when interacting in Japanese, or Japanese people when speaking the language of origin with native speakers of that language.

 

[Mark of Zorro]

If I had a false friend I would kick his behind out the door.

As soon as I learn a word in English does not match its original foreign root, I expunge it. Or what? You are going to insist on being stupid because all your friends are? You are going to jump off a cliff because all your friends are? Your false friends. Lot of good they are.

 

[Mike Cash]

If I had a false friend I would kick his behind out the door.

As soon as I learn a word in English does not match its original foreign root, I expunge it. Or what? You are going to insist on being stupid because all your friends are? You are going to jump off a cliff because all your friends are? Your false friends. Lot of good they are.

I get to choose the English vocabulary I use. I have no say in what Japanese vocabulary Japanese people use. I've been burned by the false friends enough in the past to be automatically leery and questioning of any loan words of English origin I encounter in Japanese.

Just a couple of days ago I misunderstood my boss saying ライン, thinking he was talking about the app. If he had said 線 I would have gotten it right away.

My favorite example of this sort of crap was being told フリータイムが切れた when I went to pick up a container down at the docks in Tokyo. I thought it meant the paperwork for the Customs had cleared and was just another way of saying 通関が切れた and was baffled when they wouldn't let me pick up the container. It turned out that "free time" means "the period after arrival of a container during which no additional storage charges accrue". If they had just said 無料保管期間 instead of "free time" the meaning would have been obvious.

Another item of jargon I encounter is スライド, as in 鈴木さんとスライドした。It means to meet someone heading in the opposite direction. Why they can't just say すり違う is a mystery to me.

Trust me; I'm no fan of English loan words in Japanese and it is due to purely practical considerations. They cause too much misunderstanding and confusion, and we get more than our share of them thrown out way by people who think they're facilitating communication by liberally larding their speech with katakana words.

 

[Treky]

Bike, Tension, and Cunning make me so confused sometimes. I try to explain to my students the true meaning but they all get shocked and just revert back to the way they know it. It's hard when the Japanese English teachers use the English words in the Japanese usage during class when they speak in Japanese, then they revert back to English and It gets really messy sometimes. Also my students use T& F for track and field, when I first saw them writing it I had no idea what it meant but I kinda figured since it was a club activity journal it had to be track and field.

 

[Mark of Zorro]

On of the best is AV. In Japan it means "audio visual" and in English it means "adult video".

Not so long ago, a teacher got in trouble for accidentally playing a porno up on the screen in his classroom for a few seconds because he started the wrong video.

One guy on the net joked, "He should have used the AV room!" That guy won the internets for the day!

 

[Mark of Zorro]

I try to explain to my students the true meaning but they all get shocked and just revert back to the way they know it.

On the list of why Japanese can't speak English, this must be like number 5.