What's up Asaginators! It's unfortunate that some people get offended by the title although I said in the intro that I'm simply sharing "Japanese brand names you pronounce differently". Please don't take the title as an offence since I choose it just for RUclips algorithm. I appreciate your feedback though! My Instagram: asagine Twitter: asagine_T Similar video: How To Pronounce Japanese Car Brands ▶ ruclips.net/video/Q61xvPP9Yg8/видео.html
I really enjoyed your new no BS format. Part of the reason westerners mispronounce these Japanese brands is because that is how Japanese companies market themselves overseas. Our domestic commercials for Japanese brands, made and paid for by Japanese companies, actually teach us to say them incorrectly!
It might interest you to know that many foreigners KNOW they're pronouncing it incorrectly, but they do it any ways because it sounds better. Like Nikon. We like it better the way we say it. 🤣
I think it's me who must make confused face when a Japanese pronounce "Asics" as "ASHIKKUSU" cause doesn't matter how hard I try but I can't find there letters "H, S, K" the same for "UNIQLO" 😂😂😂
why is everybody so hurt? she is not judging or even asking you to use the japanese pronunciation, just chill. If you like learning languages you will find this really interesting.
Because, the Japanese don't make the slightest attempt to change how they pronounce our words! They katakanize every - damn - word! The Japanize it and won't even try to say our words properly!
Because once they decided this is how their country and language pronounce it, there is no way they want to be told how it originally should sound like? I personally like to pronounce words in their original pronunciation (words like croissant, Tour de France etc) and show respect for the language, regardless of how people look at me or think of me. I cringed when I hear people say "kao" as cow (even if they are employees of the company that is based in another country). I don't feel the need to point them out though, since I'm not Japanese :) and when people can't understand what I say, I will tell them this is how it is pronounced in Japan and they can continue with their cows and I can continue with my ka-ous, all is good, no issues at all :)
@@jr9329 , understood. But, in the educational system, where japan spends millions a year and continues to get the same result century after century, it becomes a problem. And, English spelling, well, you know how that goes. Sounds and alphabet spelling or how a word is spelled is inconsistent. When kids constantly katakazie words, you're going to fail your tests. They just refuse to do the right thing and just either spell it the way it is supposed to be spelled or sound it the way it's supposed to be pronounced. And, there you have it. When consulting firms look for bilingual people they don't look towards Japan.
@@jr9329 The TOEIC and TOEFL scores are horrible. But, I had a teacher tell me once, that it's better to teach improper grammar than to teach it correctly where it's really hard!
Actually Toyota in Chinese is written as 丰/豐田 (Fēng tián; note how different the pronunciation in Chinese is despite using the same script as Japanese _kanji_ ), which translates as 'Toyoda' instead in Japanese, but meanwhile Nikon is tranliterated by its phonetics instead into 尼康 (Ní kāng) for some reason
Haha except they (the Japanese) don’t really try to use マックドナルド (makkudonarudo) when they’re speaking in a non-Japanese speaking country. I get what you’re trying to say though.
It was meant just as a joke, please don't take offence for what i wrote. I know it's just the way the Japanese language works, and when you speak other languages, you use the pronunciation from the respective language.
FUN FACT: Akio Morita, a founder of SONY, wanted to name the company something that sounded very American. In the late 40’s and 50’s, “sonny” was slang for “young man”. They dropped an ‘N’ and named the company SONY. Thank you for great video!
Some Chinese news reports translate Sony into 新力 (Xīn lì)(which literally means "new strength") & I thought that was how 'Sony' was written in Japanese _kanji_
'toshiba' and 'suzuki' are ones i hear pronounced wrong all the time too. with a lot of words and brands that are well known but pronounced differently in english, i always feel a bit awkward about how to say them - as i know how they should be said, but also it can seem weird to people. particularly with words like 'karate' and 'karaoke' that are well established in english now, but with completely different pronounciation.
but my more helpful answer is that you don't put emphasis on the middle syllable. for some reason english speakers frequently seem to stress the middle syllable of names.
@@JamieJamez If presented without contexts, that will still be read as 'Shii' by the Japanese. Besides, Nissin is technically Japanese word and should not be written using katagana to begin with. You still cant convince me otherwise from those CEO trying to troll the gaijins.
I actually learnt the English pronunciation with this video. As a French native, Japanese words sounds very easy to my ears and we pronounce many of them the same.
So, I live in a house where I decided to learn Spanish, downloaded Duolingo for my kids to learn Spanish, And now I have a household with me speaking Spanish, my daughter speaking French, and my son speaking Japanese. 😂😂😂 No one understands each other unless we speak English and even then… well, if you have children or have kids in your life, you understand. One thing I like doing with them is teaching them the etymology of words. We even have contests to see how many names in the credits of movies they each pronounce correctly. Etymology came up when I was helping my daughter study for a Bee and is was guiding her on how to get information she needed to spell the questions correctly. Language learning is fun and it opens you up to different cultures. We do tend to use the Americanized versions of words, though unless we are practicing other languages.
Etymology (the history of words) is critical to understanding and correctly spelling so many English words. The great thing is you get to learn about so many other languages and history: Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, German, Old English, High/Low German, Celtic, and many more!
When we talk to Japanese about brands they usually want to sell these products and they know very well what we are talking about. If we speak to ordinary people, it doesn't matter. The owners of these brands don't care how we pronounce them, they only want us to buy them. Toyota in various countries uses local way of saying Toyota. If you want to move to Japan and work for NeeSun then yeah I suppose knowing how to correctly say that is important and surely you'd need to know Japanese itself, but for the rest of us unwashed and dirty gaijin who are just barbarians we only buy the stuff and keep feeding some Japanese salaryman's enjo kosai habit.
Pronunciation of words really does make a difference. When I was in Japan I went to a MOS burger and ordered a cheeseburger. The person taking my order looked at me like I was speaking a different language even though I was speaking Japanese. I then realized even though cheeseburger was an English if I didn't pronounce it as if it were Japanese or written in Romaji or whatever was still like a foreign language. So After I said Chiizu Baaga everything was all good. lol
No but you see it's ok for Japanese to mispronounce words, it's not ok for us gaijin foreigners to not say Toyota correctly because it is a holy word made by the sacred Bushido tradition.
@@peterc.1419 As I german I feel similar. It's (M(ama) - air - (ca)ts - (m)a(te) - diss, Be(t) - n(o) - (ca)ts; M air ts a diss, Be n ts (That's the best transcription I could do)) Mercedes-Benz not (Merseediss, Benz)
A friend who worked in the Navy told us that once he asked for the initials of a ship that was approaching and the sailor said: furofo. They asked again and he repeated 'furofo'. Until someone realized that he was saying four-o-four ( 404 )...
@@Astonthepunk honest to god, I first read and write comments before watching a video...and then when I saw that it was explained in the video, I was like "oh shit, maybe I should delete the comment now"
Reminds me of the commercial for the 1981 Isuzu. There was a Japanese manager trying to coach an American salesman to say, "Isuzu," and he kept failing. In the end, the salesman is all bummed out, and the manager says, "Dat's OK, kid. I can't say 'Cheveray'."
Being Australian myself and a Nikon DSLR owner, I got a little surprised hearing people pronounce it "Naikon" on youtube, it really made me question my pronunciation of it (we all pronounced it the same here).
UK here, "Naikon" breaks British pronunciation convention, there's no "e" after the "k", there's no additional vowel before to create a diphthong. Short "i" is where it's at for us.
As a German, I found the way we pronounce the vowels of Japanese companies much closer to your original pronunciation. Pronouncing an E as a [e] is common in Germany (none of our Es are spoken like the English ee, that's what the i is for, just like in Pizza). This is also why Pokemon is pronounced wrong: é indicates a emphasized E sound like in French. Accents are often used for decoration in English...Like Motörhead or Mötley Crue...which are extremely funny when spoken in German.
I bet us Finns find the Japanese vowels ever easier. However, I reckon Germans would probably pronounce some Japanese consonant combinations better than Finns, seeing how German is quite a consonant heavy language, whereas Finnish is a vowel heavy language. Btw, Finns and Swedes could laugh at the American scifi series Stargate because they wrote it as "STARGÅTE". That A with a circle above it is a proper Swedish vowel and sounds totally different from A. Still, in my opinion, the best American brand name is probably Häagen-Dazs (the ice cream brand). It's such a joke to try to pronounce it as it's written, with Ä and A next to each other like that. But yes, the examples you mentioned are excellent as well.
@@herrakaarme :-D I've heard German inspired the Klingon language in Star Trek....it feels familiar somehow.... And Häagen-Dazs...yes. Before I knew better, I tried to pronounce it in all of its Germano-Slavic glory....it's hilarious. With the spelling, Stargate would be closer to Star Goat than to a portal to another dimension? IIRC, Star Gate is a scenario in Goat Simulator....
I´m Czech. Recently I watched same video of german brands. In the end I find I pronounce mercedes wrong. But now using google translate I see the german lady was actually pronouncing it with english nor german pronouciation. She switched it. 😀
@@michalviktorin6758 Mercedes is hard to pronounce correctly. How we Germans say the car brand is not how the female name sounds in Spanish. So what is "correct" anyway?
This video is so informative! Thank you! I can barely tell the difference in some on the words being said "wrong" vs "Correct" when demostrated in this video and i mean no rudeness by the comment. Like 1 simple letter such as the letter "E" being pronouncned as "eh" instead of "ee" is a great example. I believed its caused from livng in Calforina, because we have such a diversity of cultures here that we often hear words mispronounced due to different cultural dialects impacting the pronounciations we often hear daily. It makes it very hard to even tell the different in the words being mispronounced. Our ears and brain adjust the hearing of the word to just "make sense", and then we speak them ourselves in a generalized sense, based on our cultural perspective where many words are pronounced wrong regularly. Almost like we pronounce it lazy and try to get it just close enough to be be understood. Might I add that I worked in Pharmacy for 10 years with many pharmcists who have mirgated from various places such as India, the Philippines, Korea, and Eygpt, and it was very common that we would all have different prounouniations for the same medication names. For example a common anitbotic name Cephalexin is often pronounced, sef-uh-LAX-in, instead of sef-a-lex-en.
It is just that in english they turn "i" into "a", for me as a BR portuguese it is much easier to pronounce japanese words, I believe latin languages on general has an easier time learning other languages.
Yeah, it has to do with the phonemes and how used you are to them, or if they exist in your native language in the first place. As a Swede, I also find it easier to pronounce those words.
Also Brazilian Portuguese definitely has some perks and one of them is intonation. Makes everything a bit easier when we're trying to learn Japanese pitch accent.
As a listener who spent more than a few years in Japan as an English dialect coach, I'm mightily impressed by your mastery of L/R distinction and being able to say "sea" differentiated from "she." If these came to you naturally, that's very fortunate, but I suspect you've worked at it to very good effect. 素敵な発音！
Never mind how people say Pokémon, it's way more confusing because every language has vastly different names for all the actual Pokémon. Trying to talk to someone who plays in a different language often requires showing them a picture, because the names wouldn't make any sense.
I'm Czech and we pronounce most of the Japanese worlds correctly. It's weird but Czech and Japanese phonology is actually very similar event through the languages are totally different.
Not similar - Japanese phonemes are a strict subset of Czech phonemes. Czech people can pronounce all the Japanese phonemes easily, but not vice versa.
Spanish and Portuguese have the pronunciation of the words pretty close to the Japanese, for me the way the word in Romanji is write is the way i have to pronounce.
@@JeanSamyr Same to Finnish people. Vowels are pronounced the same in japanese, portuguese, spanish, italian, finnish. That helps It's rather easy to learn the right pronouncication of japanese language as a Finnish person, when you get those couple of special rules right ☺️
@@mrj.kottari8453 I think the pronunciation on our languages is the standard, English have some issues to be inconsistent on the pronunciation, in English actually don't have a specific way to say, some words simply change the pronounce out of the blue. for me the pronunciation is the hardest thing to learn in English.
@@JeanSamyr The asymmetricity and inconsistency in english come from the fact that it's vocabulary stems from at least 4 different languages; Old English, French, Old German, and Norse (proto Swedish/Danish/Norwegian) Example words that are loans from french have different logic in pronouncing than Old English or loans from Low German. I've spoke/read english for over 30yrs and I still make mistakes in pronouncing thanks to that inconsistency 😂
@@mrj.kottari8453 But Yakult would be still Yakult (not Yakurto), and Nissin would stay Nissin (instead of Nisshin). The pronunciation would be the same (also in Estonian) if all the romanizations were only correct...
I think a lot of Japanese companies 'westernized' their brand names around the 1950s, in order to sell overseas while giving the impression to the customer that they're probably buying something domestic (e.g. Casio, Sony, Panasonic etc)...since many westerners (especially in the US) still had a negative opinion on Japanese products or Japan in general at the time.
And now the western society are having problems with faulty products from China. I prefer to pay the extra money for genuine Japanese Electronics than Chinese products. At least Japanese Products are of quality and I found that Japanese people take pride in what they are making.
The kind of accents we are talking about here between the US and the UK are accents spoken from NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS. In the US we also have regional accents. Accents made by non-native speakers are FORIEGN ACCENTS influenced by their mother tongues. Regional accents ≠ foreign accents. Regional accents are not that difficult to understand whereas foreign accents are hard to understand.
"Foreign" names and words are Americanized. I have a Spanish name and I pronounce it differently depending on who I'm talking to: Latino, Filipino, or "American". I was in Australia once at a camera workshop in Queensland. The instructor corrected my American pronunciation of "Nikon". He said "nee-kon", like you do. Cheers.
me when philippines mentioned 😂😂😂😂 But seriously, do we pronounce Spanish names that differently? I didn't know! Always hearin cruz, de los santos, del pilar, reyes etc. I've never had the chance to speak to someone fluent in Spanish, so I wonder how it's different....
As a Finnish person, it really blows my mind to see that almost every one of these brand names are naturally pronounced almost exactly the same in my country. It's said that it's relatively easier for a Finn to learn Japanese and vice versa than a speaker of almost any other language, because of the similarities in the way we pronounce things.
Pretty much any language that doesn't use long vowels have it easy too. It's just that English, French, and the like aren't one of those languages. Filipinos, Indonesians, and the like also hsve it easy.
This is very common. It's called code switching. It's the same reason that young kids behave differently around their friends than they do with their parents.
Hello from Romania! I am glad that I am pronouncing most of these right, because English is my second language. However, it's hard to get right some of the more complex names. But it was funny to hear you pronounce the ASICS acronym from Latin (Romanian is based on Latin). Anyway, I did not know that ASICS stands for that. I learned this Latin saying in school, it means "healthy (strong) spirit in a healthy body". Learning together is the best. Thank you. I have a great respect for the Japanese culture, btw, it is truly fascinating.
There are so many American brands that the Japanese say it differently. For example, Costco is pronounced Kosutoko, MacDonald's is Makudonarudo, etc. But I don't think they are being pronounced incorrectly. They just got localized to fit the language of the people, whether it's Japanese or English speakers.
@@jamesgazeley no, its because they spell english words with katakana and when spoken, the katakana phonetics don't match our english pronounciation. They'de need a major revamp of katakana to be able to match english pronounciation.
Having lived in Japan for 12 years, I can see your perspective. A lot of those names have been "Americanized" for the US consumers since the last century, so we have accepted the pronunciation. The same goes true with the Korean brands as well; when I am in Korea, I hear the name brands pronounced differently on local TV.
But not BY the US consumers. Many non-American companies change their pronounciations for the US market because they think either we're not capable of pronouncing it correctly, we won't buy the product if it "sounds foreign," or it will just make more sense to Americans if it "sounds American." Personally, I'd rather they didn't Anglicize their names, but I have an Eastern European surname.
The biggest mispronounce Korean brand is Hyeundai. the proper way is HyeunDAE (dae as in day). Another one similar is tay kwon do. it is TAY kwan doe, not TIE
@@heika77 consider the currency rate. The Ordinary retail price is like 10usd and sold 60myr+ in my country. Its not just currency but also cost for duty,shipping and other stuffs
First time watching a video from your channel. I was surprised why a video about pronouncing 10 brand names was nearly 10 minutes long but clicked on it anyway. I was very pleasantly surprised! 🙂 It was much more informative and interesting than I had expected. I actually learned Japanese for a couple of semesters at university but sadly have forgotten so much but I think I can still pronounce Japanese words fairly OK, better than average. At least I hope so! 😂 I didn't expect the proper pronunciation for Nissin and Casio. I don't quite understand why the former wasn't introduced as Nishin for the international market. The moment I spelled Casio with an "sh" I realized that it would remind people of "cash" which maybe isn't a great association so I can understand the choice for marketing "Cashio" as Casio. (Also, the pronunciation would still be kind of wrong as English speaking would pronounce the "a" in Cashio like in cash and not the Japanese way.) Regarding Calpico, this probably was a good marketing decision. When marketing products in different markets, it's advisable to see whether the names might have any unwanted connotations and avoid these if possible. In the case of Calpis / Calpico, you obviously would want to avoid labeling a drink with a name that sounds like pіѕѕ. This reminds me of an example of transnational marketing gone wrong that our marketing professor told us. Mitsubishi originally sold its Pajero line under this name globally but later changed it in Spanish-speaking countries (and the US as I've just seen) to Montero because pajero means wаnker in the literal sense (someone who masturbates) in Spanish. Looks like the good folks from Calpis / Calpico avoided this problem! I'm not from the US and have very little interest in sports so I had no idea that Kobe Bryant was named after the beef. I know how Kobe (the city) is pronounced so just like you, I never made the connection! 😁 But the funniest one was Asics. I've seen the brand logo a few times and somehow thought that the twirl that looks like a partial derivative symbol (∂) actually is an O and the brand name is Oasis! My brain apparently decided that there's not "c" there. 🤦🏽♂😂
@@LizCowanSC Claro, no se quiere comprar un auto que no va! 😁 I think I've heard this one before but forgot about it. One has to wonder how some large corporations don't check for this kind of issue. I mean, I could understand that you come up with a brand name that has some obscene meaning in an obscure language, or even a language in a different part of the world, and that goes unnoticed. One can hardly check every language and it's debatable if the name of a candy bar sold in Peru has a dirty meaning in Lithuanian or something like this. But how can you not check name compatibility with the target market?!? I wonder if the culprit is some arrogant corporate people who cannot bear the slightest criticism. Otherwise someone in the Spanish or Mexican branch would have reported back to the head honchos saying, that Nova or Pajero is not a good idea. Baffling!
The change of the brand name from Toyoda to Toyota was also linked to the number of brush strokes to write the name in Katakana, the former being 10 strokes and the latter being 8. As I have read in articles discussing the Toyota Katakana emblem, the number 8 is considered lucky in Japan, which was a contributing factor to the change. That emblem can be seen on the truck in my profile picture.
I feel like Mexican Americans were saying a couple of these the right way. The Spanish language seems to share more in common with Japanese when it comes to pronunciation
I see a missed opportunity for a Monty Python reference during the Nikon section. She kept saying "Ni", "Ni" and I thought for a second she was trolling us. Asagi, if you have some spare time and want to enrich your understanding of obscure Western movie references, watch the "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" movie. It is old and campy, but if you have a broad sense of humor it is worth a watch (it is a comedy). p.s. I will briefly explain the movie reference if you want the tldr version. Arthur and his knights adventure to find the Holy Grail, and come across mysterious people that call themselves the "Knights who say ni". These mysterious knights use a word of power, like a spell, to force people to recoil and cower. "Ni" "Ni" "Ni" are the words they use. Even Arthur can not defeat them, so he has to go on a sub quest to buy a shrubbery (!!!!) to appease them.
Oh, what sad times are there when passing ruffians can say "Ni!" at will to old ladies! There is a pestilence in this land! Nothing is sacred! Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history!
@@yohavergonzado8112 Completely agree but the problem lies with the official romanization of the East Asian languages (yes, there are official rules). If the romanization is wrong, it makes sense that people are going to pronounce it incorrectly. It's only until you learn the languages (Korean in my case) that you realise how wrong it sometimes is. Hyundai being the worst example I can think of.
@@yohavergonzado8112 My name is Riyo and I want you to pronounce it as Oreo, because it's a name and it should be pronounced as what the owner want people to say, despite of how wrong my spelling was. Or should people pronounced it as "Rambo"? Let me think about my preference of how my name to be pronounced
@@yohavergonzado8112 The owner of the name doesn't make up the rules of the spoken language. Letters make up the sounds that's how language is supposed to work.
As a long-time retail worker in Canada, we had many discussions on how to pronounce words; like Nikon and Casio. We had even had representatives from the companies tell us different pronunciations. It was so frustrating. Thank you for these videos! It’s so nice to hear things from a native speaker. 💜
In your own country, pronounce it how your own people pronounce, but when you visit Japan, switch to Japanese pronunciation. Same applies for other international brands like IKEA (in Sweden it sounds more like ii kay uh not eye KEY uh) or Nokia (in Finland it is NOH kya not No Ki uh).
I think advertising has a lot to do with how people think a company name should be pronounced, and if the company in a country can't agree on that, it must be difficult. I know in the UK, years ago IKEA adverts all pronounced the name as "eye key uh", so as that's what the company's own adverts said, most people called it the same. At some point a few years ago, the adverts switched to the Swedish pronunciation, so now some will use the Swedish pronunciation, some either haven't seen the new adverts, as not everyone watches TV nowadays, or they have spent so many decades pronouncing it how the company told them to originally, that they either slip up sometimes, or just don't change the pronunciation. There are probably loads of different companies this applies to. Even more so in the USA, as in the UK Nikon and Adidas are pronounced in a similar way to the Japanese and German, but in the USA, they pronounce them in a very different way. The way they pronounce them is often the way they are pronounced in the company's own adverts. Not always, but it seems more of the time than in the USA, in the UK, the adverts now often have a more similar pronunciation to the original name. We still seem to be a bit far behind other European countries though. I don't know if it's partially a cultural thing. In the UK, for a long time (it's gradually improved over the last few years, although still a common issue), people would face ridicule and be seen as pretentious if they a native English speaker and use a foreign accent when pronouncing a foreign word. I don't know if this happens in other countries when a native speaker uses a foreign accent to pronounce a foreign word. It would be interesting to know if this is the case elsewhere too, or if it's a unique issue (and it is an issue here). Whereas our American cousins across the pond have the culture of bigging themselves up and being proud of their achievements, the British culture is more reserved and we'd rather play down our achievements and make out like something that we actually worked really hard for, isn't actually that impressive and try to change the subject. The culture is to be humble and modest. Coming across as pretentious is the last thing most people here would want, as it goes against our culture. I don't know if it's that which creates the issue, or if it goes back a long way to all the invasions and language changes and it's something that evolved from that and remains to this day. Up until fairly recently, there was still a lot of stigma around local dialects. As a result, a lot of people will speak their local dialect and Standard English, switching between the two. Some of the dialects will only be understood locally, and some like Northumbrian Dialect, are close to an older form of English. There's definitely a culture of having to fit in with the majority, so whereas if someone who's not a native English speaker pronounces an English word in an unusual way, most people will not make it known, as long as they understand what is said, the conversation will likely stop and it will be mentioned if a native English speaker pronounces a word with a foreign accent. Citroen for example is a French car brand. Most people know that and it's pronounced here with an English accent, which slightly alters the pronunciation. If an English person pronounced it with a French accent, so it was fully correct, people would call them pretentious, which is probably tied with queue hopping as pretty much the worst thing in our culture. It's a real issue. It stems from a good place of not wanting to make someone else feel lesser than you, even for a second, hence why people downplay their achievements. However, when it comes to other languages, it can really put a spanner in the works, and knock people's confidence to try and be more accurate with pronunciation.
They literally tell you how to pronounce Pokémon in the word in English. Yet everyone seems to ignore the accent. At least the original VA for Ash in the English dub always said it correctly.
In french, we pronounce Toyota the same way that in japanese :) with the t instead of the d. I found your video quite interesting, thank you for your great content! ^^
As a Hungarian, I think we say these brands very similar as Japanese natives do. Plus we use our names as Japanese, first the family name, second the first name. And the far best cars I have owned ever were Honda and Toyota. Good job.
Being German I have noticed many times that our languages definitely share some sounds so Germans naturally pronounce these names closer to the Japanese version.
Very informative! Thank you for this useful information. Another Japanese camera brand that English speakers often mispronounce is "Mamiya", which most pronounce as if it were Italian: "maMIya," whereas if I'm not mistaken, the syllables in Japanese are evenly stressed.
I tried saying "Twitter" to some Japanese people in many different ways, but they were so confused about what I was trying to say until I showed them the app on my phone. The Toyoda thing is a particular thing we do in American English. Often when a 't" is between certain vowels sounds, the sound changes to a blended - "d" sound; for example, better becomes "bedder", Twitter becomes "Twidder", water becomes "water", battle becomes "baddle"
American voiced tapped t sounds like tapped r to speakers of a lot of other languages. Better becomes berer, water becomes waaaarer, got to becomes gara and so on.
@@Sylkis89amazing! So they don't hear the consonant sound flap 'T' at all? To me as a native speaker of English the /d/sound really stands out even though I know apparently its not quite a full /d/ sound
@@kabedondon most dialects of English don't have a tapped r. I guess Scottish English has and some very old fashioned English people sometimes tap the r in some contexts. But I never heard USAmericans do that, but it's rather theatrical nowadays. USamericans always pronounce it either as a liquid r or as a rhoticised schwa vowel, depends on a context. Never tapped. At least to my knowledge. If someone does it's a dead giveaway it's an immigrant lol Also, mind the difference between tapped and trilled. Like in Spanish a single r is tapped, and double rr is trilled and it makes a phonemic difference. Also, other dialects of English usually don't have the American tapped t. It's actually unique to North American dialects, for the most part at least, cause surely you will be able to find instances of it in other dialects, but it's just very rare. You're more likely to come across glottal stops instead in other English speaking regions. Tapped r and tapped t don't sound exactly the same, physically it's a slightly different shape/position of the tongue, but are phonetically they are extremely similar to unstrained ears and it's an objective fact. They are very hard to distinguish when listening to a recording to most people who did not learn to be sensitive to the nuances when they're well accustomed to both sounds. Of course once you fo learn the difference your brain will pick up on the nuances and big them up in your head, create an illusion to make the distinction easier for you. And if whilst technical untrained you think they're not similar it's probably because your mind is already playing the same tricks on you by creating an illusion of tapped r sounding more like liquid r than it really does, and tapped t sounding more like regular d than it does. Which infact I say tapped t because I refer to the letter, but it's accually more of a tapped d phonetically and you do have a tapped d in American pronunciation as well and there's no difference in sound between them, just in spelling you write them dow differently and it may affect how you think about them that they're separate despite sounding the same. Which is probably why you associate tapped t with d - cause you do in some contexts tap both, but because you also voice the tapped t it makes those variants of t and d sound the same, but you still notice it's not exactly the same as a regular plosive d. But yeah if you ask for instance a Polish person to transcribe how they hear USAmerican accent with Polish orthography, if you give them a phrase like "We've got to move out" they will write down "łi gara muw ałt" (Polish ł sound like w in English and Polish w sounds like v in English lol). I know Spanish speakers also often think that water is pronounced warer and get confused when you tell them it's actually not lol but remember that they think of a different r than the liquid r USAmericans associate with this letter. Bonus fact. Japanese lateral r is technically a yet different sound physically but it's also very similar sounding to tapped r to untrained ears. But because it's lateral that's why it makes it difficult for many Japanese people to tell the difference between r and l lol and once they learn how to pronoucne American style liquid r they also pronounce l that way a lot of times and it takes some work for them to actually learn the nuances that neither English r not l sound like the Japanese r, that Japanese r is just something in between the two. It's kinda like if I pronoucned Polish sz and ś to you, you will probably hear both as sh and will have a hard time learning the difference lol
@@kabedondon when you learn a language's phonology, your brain makes perceptual adjustments whenever hearing speech, makes some approximations. Otherwise it would be impossible to communicate as everyone speaks a little differently, even the same person will speak less clearly when tired after jogging or drunk and so on yet you understand them. The same mechanism kicks in when you listen to a foreign language and your brain tries to apply approximations of your native langauges phonology and makes you misinterpret some things as a result and it is sometimes hard to learn to perceive it otherwise, learn to hear the nuances. For me a lot of English vowels still feel like they rhyme even if they don't for native speakers, despite me being able to easily tell the difference at this point and also pronounce them correctly the non-native feel towards them remains. Like in American English I'd say that 'matter' and 'butter' rhyme despite me being to easily tell that the a and the u are not pronoucned the same. They still feel simialr to me because we don't have so many vowels in Polish and the contrast between some English vowels would be just intonation in Polish perception.
It just has something to do with the letters being accurate to pronunciation which in English it isn’t. The same applies for German speakers they will also pronounce the words more or less correctly due to this fact.
It's funny that as a German native, I seem to have less problems pronouncing Japanese right compared to many other languages. It's because Japanese uses the same vocals as German. The entire Kana alphabet can be written in German letters, since "romanji" is actually the way we would pronounce it in German
English is just orthographically deeper than, say, German, Spanish, Italian, Malay, or Turkish, and then people apply those rules to a script where there is no such depth
While there are many similar sounds which makes it easier for us Germans than native english speakers, they are not quite the same. We are just able to reproduce the japanese sounds easier because we have almost all of them in our german language in some kind of variation (except the "r" sound). The "u" in german for example is more pronounced like an "ü" in japanese. Also they are called "romaji" which would be pronounced as close to "romadschi", so not quite.. I heard that finnish is closest to japanese in its sounds but I don't really know about that.
Japaner betonen jede Silbe gleich lang, ohne eine Silbe besonders zu betonen, soweit ich weiß. Im Deutschen betonen wir bei Toyota die zweite Silbe. Bei Kobe betonen wir die erste Silbe. Und bei Nikon sprechen wir das n anders aus, nicht so nasal wie die Japaner.
They are the same everywhere in the world, not only in German. Vowels pronunciation is basically the same in every language but English, because of the vowel shift English went through in the 16th-17th century. In mostly every language the standard way of pronouncing words written in Latin characters is the same it was in Latin: A like MAmA, E like fathEr or mEn, I like bEEn or pIn, O like pOt, U like pUt, or small variations of those. When you write Japanese words in Romanji, Latin alphabet, they pronounce it in the same way as everyone else -- but English.
Same as in Hebrew. In general, native English speakers use different vowel pronounciation when it comes to Latin alphabet vowels. Let's take the word SHALOM in Hebrew for example, native English speakers would pronounce it more as SHAeLOWM.
So the main reason for Toyoda to the change to Toyota was the amount of strokes it takes to write it. Went from 10 to 8(8 being lucky prosperity number in Japan)
I find the diversity of pronunciation allows me to keep an open mind about how different the rest of the world can be (on a very small level of course). Rather than seeing these as mispronounced, I just see it as different cultures adding their diverse perspectives on it. In a way, it’s almost more fun to have different takes on pronunciation. In the US, there are millions of travelers from around the world coming through here every year, and hearing their unique accents makes it fun, and reminds you that there isn’t only one way to operate in this world. I have found that there is almost no culture that pronounces the same word in the same tone. Even in America, a Californian will say certain words differently than it would be said by a traditional accent from Texas, Louisiana, or New York as an example. We’re all “American” speaking English, and yet the same words are said differently. In any event, thank you for sharing the pronunciation of these words from the origin country’s perspective. It’s always nice to learn how the culture these words came from pronounces them. Please share more if they come to you!
Can you give an example of California and Texan saying the same word differently ? It’s not that different isn’t it? That’ll be like Kyoto and Tokyo accent. Very similar.
My dad learned Esperanto in school in the UK in the 1960s. I feel like a lot of these mispronunciations stem from the fact that Roman alphabet languages often pronounce down to letter phonemes, whereas Japanese is based more around syllables as base units of sounds.
You sure it was Esperanto? The made up language devised in the late 19th century? Schools in Nottingham only taught latin, French and German in the 60s.
Yes, Nihongo (and Tagalog) are syllabic languages. Ta, Ka, Tse, Ba, and so on. Romance languages, Korean, Chinese, etc. are letter based. However, I also noticed that vowel pronunciations between Asian and Western languages are different too. Here in Asia, regardless if it is syllabic or letter-based, vowels are pronounced one way, like "a" is "ah" not "ey". So apple is "ah-pol" not "ey-pol", and so on. Many, if not all, Western languages have weird vowel pronunciations which in turn causes confusion when one tries to read Asian languages. For example, the Filipino food "taho" or "balut"/"balot". I've heard Western foreigners say it as "tey-ho" and "bey-lut" respectively. Another example is ASEAN. Asian pronunciations are: ah-syan and ah-si-yan. Westerners pronounce it as "ey-sea-an"; and without proper context, we can't understand it. 😅😅😅😅
Arabic speaker here and I'm quite surprised of how well we pronounce these Japanese brand names correctly since English isn't our first language, so it's hard to mispronounce most of these
Yeah, Arabic and Japanese have a similarity where they are both phonetic language where every characters have a consistent sound/pronunciation. English on the other hand have a very inconsistent sound, like how every "e" in Mercedes each have different sound if you pronounce it in American accent.
Most people in Brazil pronounce Toyota with an open O, like "Tóyóta", but it's a closed vowel "Tôyôta". For the French person above, I used ó and ô as in Portuguese just as a key for the Brazilian person above.
Going from one language to another inevitably results in different pronunciations, and it's always fascinating to see how these words get transformed when the language changes. Some brands even encourage a different pronunciation to make life easier for non-native speakers of the language. For example, years ago, Hyundai did an entire ad campaign that "taught" English speakers to pronounce the brand "Hunday like Sunday," but any Korean speaker will know that's not accurate at all.
Love the little „a“s thrown in to your English to make it sound more fluent, and out of habit. „What’a“ just sounds a lot cuter than „what“ 😌 My Japanese teacher lives in the U.S. for 30 years now and he still does it sometimes
Very interesting video. I've never had a problem with Nikon or Toyota. I think the latter is an American English issue as they seem to pronounce 't' as 'd' quite often. I've never heard Toyota pronounced incorrectly in the UK. One of the problems is when translating between English a language with a different script. Sometimes there's no matching sound but sometimes it's just badly done. In Thai for instance there's a beer brand that's written in English as Singha so that's how most westerners say it but Thais call it beer Sing which comes from the Thai for lion. In your video Asia's is a good example. The text you put on screen makes it pretty clear.
Great video and thank you for sharing the correct pronunciations. This is funny because my Japanese wife made me aware of how many English Brand names Japanese people pronounce incorrectly. Like how you add "o" or "u"to the end of so many words like McDonaldso. Kawaii. It's also cho strange that we don't even pronounce Japan correctly.
You can"t blame if non-Japanese consumers of Japanese brands pronounce them incorrectly because it is how the those brands are pronounced by manufacturers or in commercials or by salespeople is how those brands are recognized. One of the most famous mispronounced Japanese words in America is "karaoke", because society here sells it as "kareeokee" which doesn't even look like how karaoke should be pronounced, but most Americans are forced into hearing the wrong pronunciation therefore that is what they know. Other Japanese brands are westernized for sales purposes such as Toyoda being sold as Toyota. Nikon is always pronounced as Ny-kon instead of nee-kon since it was introduced. Sony isn't exactly correct Japanese spelling either, but that's how it's sold. Look at Nintendo. It should be pronounced Neen-te-n-do, but is prounounced Nin-ten-do.
Title should be *"HOW JAPANESE PRONOUNCE THESE 10 JAPANESE BRANDS"* Some of these brands had english or latin origins so english speakers don't speak it "wrong" they just speak it "different" base on the nature of their language.
@@Kettvnen Right? I've lived so long in Japan and have only noticed it here in Japan. The name seemed Japanese to me. I guess it's like how most Japanese think that Auld Lang Syne is a Japanese song, because they've only heard it in Japan and it's such a normal tune that can be heard daily in Japan, and even has Japanese lyrics.
This isn't really how language works, as others have pointed out. Loan words and foreign words are pronounced using the phonetic system of the language being spoken. Saying "Toe-yo-duh" instead of "Toh-yo-ta" when speaking American English isn't "wrong", that's how many people (depending on dialect) pronounce that arrangement of letters in English. By this same logic, Japanese people are all speaking "incorrectly" any time they say any Katakana word. This is an extra impossible standard/rule to try to follow in English because of how many of our words come from other languages that have differing original pronunciations. If the subject was foreigners pronouncing these words incorrectly *while speaking Japanese* then sure, you could say saying these words in these ways is "wrong". But if someone is speaking English, and they suddenly switch their entire system of pronunciation, intonation, and emphasis, just for one word, it sounds really strange, as it would in any language.
@@rafaellucero5098 não cara, se vc acha que a pronúncia certa de _suzuki_ é _sudzuki_ , vc tá enganado. A pronúncia certa é exatamente igual a gente fala aqui mesmo What Karim Maassen said btw was news to me, I didn't no, but makes sence, because _matsuda_ is an actual japanese surname (tsu, not dzu)
This video is aimed towards America and English only speakers. Its irrelevant to most other languages because almost all of them (at least in Europe idk really about other languages) pronounce all of these brands correctly, its actually completely natural fir us to pronounce them like this.
Europe and America sure had some influences on life and art in Japan but one of the major differences between western influences on Japan and japanese influences on the west is that: Japan is and always was an assimilation culture. Meaning they apopt something and make it Japanese while wester culture tends to simply immitate. To get an idea I recommand to read Peter Schilling's "Encyclodepia of Japanese Pop Culture".
@@corneliusdobeneck4081 I'm not sure. There are many non-European things which were assimilated into Western culture. Take something like food in the States, you have everything from Chinese to Russian to French etc... even if much of the time it's been changed, eg pizza outside of Italy vs Italian pizza. I think there isn't a difference otherwise we have to ask... are Japanese different people to Europeans or everyone else? There is no basis for this in biology or sociology. Japanese are island people. But so are the British and Irish. So are the Taiwanese. Even the Swiss could be thought to be isolated as though Island people...
@@corneliusdobeneck4081 But I was even going to mention aspects of Asian dress which made it's way into European culture, food, music, algebra... etc... from East. Coffee is a good example. There is also tea. Westerners made these their own.... then Japan took from the West coffee and tea....
@@DLightBelgium Well, I did say "Europeans" - I thought that would include you guys :-) Of course the Brits will say "toyOTA" but at least they get Nikon right ...
Deutch Oesterich Spain Italy France etc... ja, I think European has no problem pronounce it near to Japanese because almost all languange except English pronounce A B C as A B C not e bi si
Yakult in Japan pronounced " "Yakuruto"...but that's Japanese word... How do you expect a foreigner to pronounce it Yakuruto when it is clearly in the label " Yakult " unless you're a Japanese... 😁😀😊
@@iheartheenim I think what they are saying is we pronounce what is written on the package if it says Coke we are going to say Coke we aren’t going to say Coke a cola brewing company so if we see Yakult that’s what we would call it
As an engineer, I think asics is the most misleading name for a sports wear brand. Asics sounds like the plural of 'asic', which is an acronym that stands for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit.
Exactly , When first time heard of this brand. I thought it a "smart sneaker " kind of , embedding the ASIC chip inside. it's time The self lacing sneaker in Back to The Future II come to reality.
Crazy bc my Spanish speaking brain thought these acronym were in Italian, because they easy to translate for me. "Alma Sana en cuerpo sano" healty soul in a healthy body"
no no no. If ASICS comes really from the Latin "Anima Sana In Corpore Sano", the pronunciation becomes Roman Latin/Modern Italian: "AHHSEEKS" Not "Asiksuru"....
It's similar to how people expect us to pronounce France brand correctly (hermes, louis vitton), Asagi-san is teaching the correct way to pronounce Japanese products and I think that's very interesting. And good to know in indonesia, we pronounce Kobe, Nikon, Toyota and Pokemon correctly, because we only have 5 vowels and they sound just as they are XD
It's kinda funny how as a Dutchman, I'd be pretty close with most pronunciations, except for the ones where extra sounds were added (Niss*H*in, Yakult*O*). Especially brands like Nikon or Toyota would be spot-on for anyone speaking Dutch. An interisting one not mentioned here is Tamiya. For years I've been told I was pronouncing it wrong: T*ah*miya, with a little stress on the first syllable a bit, but not by much. But no, everyone always told me it's Ta*MI*ya, with a strong stress on the second syllable. And then came RUclips with lots of English content, and more often than not something like T*EH*miya. But years later I visited Shizuoka and quickly found out my original pronunciation actually wasn't so far off after all....
My Asian friend speaks perfect English but when he talks to other Asians that don’t speak his own language he speaks broken English to them lol I guess that helps them understand ? 😂
It's true. I'm a teacher in Philippines and I can speak fluent English. But again, English is not Asian's first language. Everyone was different. Some are already good at it and some are still learning. In order for them to understand, I have to make my English a little broken to emphasize the words I want them to understand more. For example; instead of saying "No thanks, I ate already. How about you?" I will say "No. Me done eating. You?" But I believe this goes to not just Asians. I believe people around the world that doesn't use English as their first language, also use broken English to communicate with people who are still learning it. Also, does your Asian friend that speaks perfect English has the same Asian ethnicity with the other Asians he talk to? That must be a factor to it. Not all Asians speaks the same language.
PhD students joining the primate sign language development programme were taken aback when they discovered the chimpanzees would talk down to them and sign slowly and "loudly".
Because it's a different language lololol even though it uses English words. It might be"broken" English but it's not broken Singlish or Malaysian English, Japanese English or whatever language that they were speaking hahahahaha
@@zenithzeitgeist7489 No Mazda is the right spelling, the japanese pronunciation is ironically the wrong one since they indeed are referencing the god: Ahura Mazda
Japanese tend to add G after N in their pronunciation, so it sounds NG rather than N. In Indonesia we call Jepang for Japan. Its sounds like what Japanese people's who read JAPAN.
I suspect a lot of it comes from the fact that words are pronounced very differently depending on region in English speaking countries. Just within england itself, words are pronounced very differently, just 20 or 30 miles away. I think that other languages, such as Japanese, are much more subtle than english, where small variations in how a word is said can make it a totally different word or meaning. English generally isn't like that. It can be sometimes, but often isn't. I think these 2 things lead people to be much more relaxed with the pronouncement of words in English to the point where often other language speakers pronounce english words "more accurately" from a technical point pf view than native english speakers. This was a wonderful video by the way.
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
What's up Asaginators! It's unfortunate that some people get offended by the title although I said in the intro that I'm simply sharing "Japanese brand names you pronounce differently". Please don't take the title as an offence since I choose it just for RUclips algorithm. I appreciate your feedback though!
My Instagram: asagine
Twitter: asagine_T
Similar video: How To Pronounce Japanese Car Brands
▶ ruclips.net/video/Q61xvPP9Yg8/видео.html
Lol, you think these are bad? How about how Japanese people butcher English words with katakana? 🤣 ウイルス??? Willis? Ohhhhhh, you mean 'virus'!!
I really enjoyed your new no BS format. Part of the reason westerners mispronounce these Japanese brands is because that is how Japanese companies market themselves overseas. Our domestic commercials for Japanese brands, made and paid for by Japanese companies, actually teach us to say them incorrectly!
It might interest you to know that many foreigners KNOW they're pronouncing it incorrectly, but they do it any ways because it sounds better.
Like Nikon. We like it better the way we say it. 🤣
Asaginators, i love that !
I think it's me who must make confused face when a Japanese pronounce "Asics" as "ASHIKKUSU" cause doesn't matter how hard I try but I can't find there letters "H, S, K" the same for "UNIQLO" 😂😂😂
why is everybody so hurt? she is not judging or even asking you to use the japanese pronunciation, just chill. If you like learning languages you will find this really interesting.
Thanks for saying that!!
Because, the Japanese don't make the slightest attempt to change how they pronounce our words! They katakanize every - damn - word! The Japanize it and won't even try to say our words properly!
Because once they decided this is how their country and language pronounce it, there is no way they want to be told how it originally should sound like?
I personally like to pronounce words in their original pronunciation (words like croissant, Tour de France etc) and show respect for the language, regardless of how people look at me or think of me. I cringed when I hear people say "kao" as cow (even if they are employees of the company that is based in another country). I don't feel the need to point them out though, since I'm not Japanese :) and when people can't understand what I say, I will tell them this is how it is pronounced in Japan and they can continue with their cows and I can continue with my ka-ous, all is good, no issues at all :)
@@jr9329 , understood. But, in the educational system, where japan spends millions a year and continues to get the same result century after century, it becomes a problem. And, English spelling, well, you know how that goes. Sounds and alphabet spelling or how a word is spelled is inconsistent. When kids constantly katakazie words, you're going to fail your tests. They just refuse to do the right thing and just either spell it the way it is supposed to be spelled or sound it the way it's supposed to be pronounced. And, there you have it. When consulting firms look for bilingual people they don't look towards Japan.
@@jr9329 The TOEIC and TOEFL scores are horrible. But, I had a teacher tell me once, that it's better to teach improper grammar than to teach it correctly where it's really hard!
1:17 Kobe
2:17 NISSIN
3:09 CALPIS/ CALPICO
4:04 TOYOTA
5:05 UNIQLO
5:42 ASICS
6:28 Nikon
7:16 CASIO
7:43 Yakult
8:32 Pokémon
Oh, so helpful and handy.
Thank you.
神戸
日清
カルピコ
トヨタ
ユニクロ
アシックス
ニコン
カシオ
ヤクルト
ポケモン
Actually Toyota in Chinese is written as 丰/豐田 (Fēng tián; note how different the pronunciation in Chinese is despite using the same script as Japanese _kanji_ ), which translates as 'Toyoda' instead in Japanese, but meanwhile Nikon is tranliterated by its phonetics instead into 尼康 (Ní kāng) for some reason
👍
:)
Japanese: "You are pronouncing our brands wrong!"
Also Japanese: "MakUDonArUdO"
Haha except they (the Japanese) don’t really try to use マックドナルド (makkudonarudo) when they’re speaking in a non-Japanese speaking country. I get what you’re trying to say though.
It was meant just as a joke, please don't take offence for what i wrote. I know it's just the way the Japanese language works, and when you speak other languages, you use the pronunciation from the respective language.
@@maybe867Yeah I know what you meant.
"Kito kato" too for kit kat...
theres actually a song about their pronunciations cant remember the title
@@Burneth_ Tokyo Bon by Namewee for the Olympics?
Great, great video!! 😁 Very informative, interesting and entertaining!! Love your sense of humour! 😂 Well done 👍
FUN FACT: Akio Morita, a founder of SONY, wanted to name the company something that sounded very American. In the late 40’s and 50’s, “sonny” was slang for “young man”. They dropped an ‘N’ and named the company SONY. Thank you for great video!
Some Chinese news reports translate Sony into 新力 (Xīn lì)(which literally means "new strength") & I thought that was how 'Sony' was written in Japanese _kanji_
@@lzh4950 Original comment learned from Morita’s biography. Good book! 👍🏼
Ah yes the "Young Man PlayStation"
A guy at my local gas station has "Sony" on his nametag, pronounced "Sonny"
Another fun fact: there is a Toyoda town in Hino, Tokyo. It has the same spelling, 豊田, as Toyota in Aichi.
Spanish speaker here, we pronounce almost everyone of these brands as they should be pronounced. Can confirm.
Ditto for italians
Also for Germans
Ahuevodesu
Lies, Lies, and more lies
The vowels are certainly pronounced the same. English is more aye ee eye oh you
As long as you don't say "pokeman" we can still be friends.
Get your pokemans off the floor
fr fr
Pokeman
Poky mans lol
Yeah, I got your ‘Pocket Monster’ for you, right HERE! lol
'toshiba' and 'suzuki' are ones i hear pronounced wrong all the time too.
with a lot of words and brands that are well known but pronounced differently in english, i always feel a bit awkward about how to say them - as i know how they should be said, but also it can seem weird to people. particularly with words like 'karate' and 'karaoke' that are well established in english now, but with completely different pronounciation.
Now I'm curious if I've been saying all of those wrong my whole life 😂 how are they supposed to be pronounced?
@@AlysiaTribeca as they are written.
to shi ba
su zu ki!
but my more helpful answer is that you don't put emphasis on the middle syllable. for some reason english speakers frequently seem to stress the middle syllable of names.
Nissin owners hiding the "h" and waiting for the chance to correct foreign investors during awkward business meetings😂
probably because Japanese does not have 'si' sound. They only have sa shi su se so, but I prefer your theory.
@@DeadHix There is an extended katakana sound for スィ(SI)
@@JamieJamez If presented without contexts, that will still be read as 'Shii' by the Japanese. Besides, Nissin is technically Japanese word and should not be written using katagana to begin with. You still cant convince me otherwise from those CEO trying to troll the gaijins.
There is no c. Like when japanese say see it sounds like she because the sound doesn't exist
@@popn6189 yah you are right.... i mistook the katana su with katakana shi.
I actually learnt the English pronunciation with this video. As a French native, Japanese words sounds very easy to my ears and we pronounce many of them the same.
But Japan switched from copying France to copying Prussia after Prussia showed who's boss in 1879.
Same here, the actual Japanese pronunciation is sooo similar to ours! I didn't they had nasal vowels too
Latin languages seem to give a good base. It’s my Spanish that makes pronouncing Japanese a bit more intuitive for me.
Great, my friend
Most European languages can naturally pronounce japanese words correctly, this video is almost only relevant to native English speakers.
So, I live in a house where I decided to learn Spanish, downloaded Duolingo for my kids to learn Spanish, And now I have a household with me speaking Spanish, my daughter speaking French, and my son speaking Japanese. 😂😂😂 No one understands each other unless we speak English and even then… well, if you have children or have kids in your life, you understand. One thing I like doing with them is teaching them the etymology of words. We even have contests to see how many names in the credits of movies they each pronounce correctly. Etymology came up when I was helping my daughter study for a Bee and is was guiding her on how to get information she needed to spell the questions correctly. Language learning is fun and it opens you up to different cultures. We do tend to use the Americanized versions of words, though unless we are practicing other languages.
What is a 'Bee', other than an insect?
@@BasilPunton Spelling bee
@@BasilPunton it’s a tiny fly animal. Make honey
@@BasilPuntonit is a spelling contest: whoever can correctly spell the most obscure and difficult to spell words wins.
Etymology (the history of words) is critical to understanding and correctly spelling so many English words. The great thing is you get to learn about so many other languages and history: Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, German, Old English, High/Low German, Celtic, and many more!
She's just teaching us how to pronounce the brands so that when we talk to japanese they will understand what we are saying.
She's too beautiful. Can't focus! 😍
Actually e.g. 'Asics' is officially 'Onitsuka Tiger' in Japan... the latin Abbreviation is made for western market.
Or just teaching us to not be stupid. Teaching us to be correct
When we talk to Japanese about brands they usually want to sell these products and they know very well what we are talking about. If we speak to ordinary people, it doesn't matter. The owners of these brands don't care how we pronounce them, they only want us to buy them. Toyota in various countries uses local way of saying Toyota. If you want to move to Japan and work for NeeSun then yeah I suppose knowing how to correctly say that is important and surely you'd need to know Japanese itself, but for the rest of us unwashed and dirty gaijin who are just barbarians we only buy the stuff and keep feeding some Japanese salaryman's enjo kosai habit.
She just trying to help educate the US population and doing a far better job than the US Government does.
Pronunciation of words really does make a difference. When I was in Japan I went to a MOS burger and ordered a cheeseburger. The person taking my order looked at me like I was speaking a different language even though I was speaking Japanese. I then realized even though cheeseburger was an English if I didn't pronounce it as if it were Japanese or written in Romaji or whatever was still like a foreign language. So After I said Chiizu Baaga everything was all good. lol
No but you see it's ok for Japanese to mispronounce words, it's not ok for us gaijin foreigners to not say Toyota correctly because it is a holy word made by the sacred Bushido tradition.
@@peterc.1419 As I german I feel similar. It's (M(ama) - air - (ca)ts - (m)a(te) - diss, Be(t) - n(o) - (ca)ts; M air ts a diss, Be n ts (That's the best transcription I could do)) Mercedes-Benz not (Merseediss, Benz)
@@marioo849 he is being sarcastic.
A friend who worked in the Navy told us that once he asked for the initials of a ship that was approaching and the sailor said: furofo.
They asked again and he repeated 'furofo'. Until someone realized that he was saying four-o-four ( 404 )...
@@lotus_flower2000 He's should try to do it better then.
Didn't even know "Asics" was a japanese brand.
ive always thought Asics was derived from the word basic as in basic necessities for sports so this was really cool
It's an acronym for the latin phrase: anima sana in corpore sano = sound mind in a sound body
@@8tonystark8 Yeap we all watched the video like you did :3
@@8tonystark8 and what does that mean?
@@Astonthepunk honest to god, I first read and write comments before watching a video...and then when I saw that it was explained in the video, I was like "oh shit, maybe I should delete the comment now"
Reminds me of the commercial for the 1981 Isuzu. There was a Japanese manager trying to coach an American salesman to say, "Isuzu," and he kept failing. In the end, the salesman is all bummed out, and the manager says, "Dat's OK, kid. I can't say 'Cheveray'."
I don't remember that commercial, but I can envision it😂😂😂
Exactly! Thank you.
Interestingly, in Australia we pronounce Nikon as "Nikon" not "Naikon". Plus I've used Nikon cameras for many years :)
Being Australian myself and a Nikon DSLR owner, I got a little surprised hearing people pronounce it "Naikon" on youtube, it really made me question my pronunciation of it (we all pronounced it the same here).
Ha yes we get Nikon right but AIsuzu (Isuzu) always makes me cringe...
Yes we call it Nikon as in knee con, but then some people around here pronouce it "sam-you-rye"
For me Nikon is much better for Indoor. Still good tho
I prefer Sony, like damn I love sony mirrorless🤩
UK here, "Naikon" breaks British pronunciation convention, there's no "e" after the "k", there's no additional vowel before to create a diphthong. Short "i" is where it's at for us.
Looks like I've been pronouncing Nikon correctly the whole time. I'm so proud of myself 😎
I'm proud of you too 👏
Seems like the way we Dutch pronounce it, is the right way too :)
I had no idea it was a Japanese brand lol.
@@harmmiddeljans6468 same in Slovakia and Czech Republic 👍, looks like Europeans know how to pronounce foreign words....not like US and UK folks 🤣
Same here, I've never pronounced it nigh-kon so I'm proud of both of us♡
Not really familiar with Cal Piss, but changing the English name of this product made a lot of sense.
Germans would recommend a name change for Uniqlo too. Because "qlo" sounds like the german word "klo" which means toilet.
In french " e-tron " means ... !
@@tomkiki6499 Haha, yes i know! What a big fail for such a big company like Audi, that they didn't check the name before! 🤦
Hmmmm. Sounds like beer from a fake GTA V game ad or something similar.
Brewed from the muddy water of the San Joaquin river, it’s Cal Piss!
@@Roboprogs In Japanese, it's not Cal, it's pronounced Ca-ru -- two syllables.
Asagi, you are sooo peetty. Thank you for teaching us correct pronunciation and beautiful Japanese culture.
Thank you for sharing. Love the little history lessons behind the names, too.
I love how she explains the background story as well ☺️
Me too, my friend. Amazing video 🥰🥰
She's farting into a barrel with her naive insistence that foreigners should pronounce Japanese brand names the way the Japanese pronounce them.
As a German, I found the way we pronounce the vowels of Japanese companies much closer to your original pronunciation.
Pronouncing an E as a [e] is common in Germany (none of our Es are spoken like the English ee, that's what the i is for, just like in Pizza). This is also why Pokemon is pronounced wrong: é indicates a emphasized E sound like in French. Accents are often used for decoration in English...Like Motörhead or Mötley Crue...which are extremely funny when spoken in German.
I bet us Finns find the Japanese vowels ever easier. However, I reckon Germans would probably pronounce some Japanese consonant combinations better than Finns, seeing how German is quite a consonant heavy language, whereas Finnish is a vowel heavy language.
Btw, Finns and Swedes could laugh at the American scifi series Stargate because they wrote it as "STARGÅTE". That A with a circle above it is a proper Swedish vowel and sounds totally different from A. Still, in my opinion, the best American brand name is probably Häagen-Dazs (the ice cream brand). It's such a joke to try to pronounce it as it's written, with Ä and A next to each other like that. But yes, the examples you mentioned are excellent as well.
@@herrakaarme :-D I've heard German inspired the Klingon language in Star Trek....it feels familiar somehow.... And Häagen-Dazs...yes. Before I knew better, I tried to pronounce it in all of its Germano-Slavic glory....it's hilarious.
With the spelling, Stargate would be closer to Star Goat than to a portal to another dimension? IIRC, Star Gate is a scenario in Goat Simulator....
Ye same here in Holland. But we also pronounce bmw, audi, volkswagen and mercedes as it should be pronounced ;p
I´m Czech. Recently I watched same video of german brands. In the end I find I pronounce mercedes wrong. But now using google translate I see the german lady was actually pronouncing it with english nor german pronouciation. She switched it. 😀
@@michalviktorin6758 Mercedes is hard to pronounce correctly. How we Germans say the car brand is not how the female name sounds in Spanish. So what is "correct" anyway?
This video is so informative! Thank you! I can barely tell the difference in some on the words being said "wrong" vs "Correct" when demostrated in this video and i mean no rudeness by the comment. Like 1 simple letter such as the letter "E" being pronouncned as "eh" instead of "ee" is a great example. I believed its caused from livng in Calforina, because we have such a diversity of cultures here that we often hear words mispronounced due to different cultural dialects impacting the pronounciations we often hear daily. It makes it very hard to even tell the different in the words being mispronounced. Our ears and brain adjust the hearing of the word to just "make sense", and then we speak them ourselves in a generalized sense, based on our cultural perspective where many words are pronounced wrong regularly. Almost like we pronounce it lazy and try to get it just close enough to be be understood.
Might I add that I worked in Pharmacy for 10 years with many pharmcists who have mirgated from various places such as India, the Philippines, Korea, and Eygpt, and it was very common that we would all have different prounouniations for the same medication names. For example a common anitbotic name Cephalexin is often pronounced, sef-uh-LAX-in, instead of sef-a-lex-en.
It is just that in english they turn "i" into "a", for me as a BR portuguese it is much easier to pronounce japanese words, I believe latin languages on general has an easier time learning other languages.
Yeah, it has to do with the phonemes and how used you are to them, or if they exist in your native language in the first place. As a Swede, I also find it easier to pronounce those words.
Also Brazilian Portuguese definitely has some perks and one of them is intonation. Makes everything a bit easier when we're trying to learn Japanese pitch accent.
As a german it's also not hard to pronounce these brands right
same in french
Realmente, eu sempre notei isso. Parece que o português facilita o pronunciamento do japonês. Deve ser porque contem todos os sons naturalmente.
*Japanese video game narrative:* “STREET FIGHTER!”
Japanese: “Sutorito Faita”
Laugh so hard
@@ivankulola5847 language so hard
@@flowerofash4439 😂😂 indeed
Or for brands, "Microsoft" vs something more like "my-kuh-ro-so-fuh-to"
Sutorito faita tuh furashu ( street fighter 2 ' )
As a listener who spent more than a few years in Japan as an English dialect coach, I'm mightily impressed by your mastery of L/R distinction and being able to say "sea" differentiated from "she." If these came to you naturally, that's very fortunate, but I suspect you've worked at it to very good effect. 素敵な発音！
It’s really striking that many Americans pronounce foreign names wrong. Not only Japanese but also for example German names as well.
You are telling about Americans🤣, Russians pronounce them however they want, and think that Japanese are wrong.
Never mind how people say Pokémon, it's way more confusing because every language has vastly different names for all the actual Pokémon.
Trying to talk to someone who plays in a different language often requires showing them a picture, because the names wouldn't make any sense.
I'm Czech and we pronounce most of the Japanese worlds correctly. It's weird but Czech and Japanese phonology is actually very similar event through the languages are totally different.
Not similar - Japanese phonemes are a strict subset of Czech phonemes. Czech people can pronounce all the Japanese phonemes easily, but not vice versa.
We pronounce it all correctly in latin language counties too I guess
Interesting, as a portuguese speaker, I got most of them correctly also. Except ASICS. That I got very wrong.
it's a slavic and Latin thing
nah Indonesian pronounce them easily, but maybe not perfect
Here in the UK we pronounce most of these brands closer to the Japanese pronunciation compared to the US.
I’m amazed that in Spanish we pronounce them like the Japanese equivalent.
Bravissimi.
Niente da dire.
As a mexican I pronounce all this brands just right. The pronunciation it's pretty similar to Spanish.
Spanish and Portuguese have the pronunciation of the words pretty close to the Japanese, for me the way the word in Romanji is write is the way i have to pronounce.
@@JeanSamyr
Same to Finnish people. Vowels are pronounced the same in japanese, portuguese, spanish, italian, finnish. That helps
It's rather easy to learn the right pronouncication of japanese language as a Finnish person, when you get those couple of special rules right ☺️
@@mrj.kottari8453 I think the pronunciation on our languages is the standard, English have some issues to be inconsistent on the pronunciation, in English actually don't have a specific way to say, some words simply change the pronounce out of the blue.
for me the pronunciation is the hardest thing to learn in English.
@@JeanSamyr
The asymmetricity and inconsistency in english come from the fact that it's vocabulary stems from at least 4 different languages;
Old English, French, Old German, and Norse (proto Swedish/Danish/Norwegian)
Example words that are loans from french have different logic in pronouncing than Old English or loans from Low German.
I've spoke/read english for over 30yrs and I still make mistakes in pronouncing thanks to that inconsistency 😂
@@mrj.kottari8453 But Yakult would be still Yakult (not Yakurto), and Nissin would stay Nissin (instead of Nisshin). The pronunciation would be the same (also in Estonian) if all the romanizations were only correct...
I think a lot of Japanese companies 'westernized' their brand names around the 1950s, in order to sell overseas while giving the impression to the customer that they're probably buying something domestic (e.g. Casio, Sony, Panasonic etc)...since many westerners (especially in the US) still had a negative opinion on Japanese products or Japan in general at the time.
That's true!
More like "anglicised"
SONY started as SONY
@@SeanAlcorn Well, actually, Sony started as Totsuko (Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo).
And now the western society are having problems with faulty products from China. I prefer to pay the extra money for genuine Japanese Electronics than Chinese products. At least Japanese Products are of quality and I found that Japanese people take pride in what they are making.
Just the difference between UK and US pronunciation varies quite wildly, bearing in mind their both speaking english...
Two peoples separated by a common language.
@@robertolson483 and a bloody great ocean
The kind of accents we are talking about here between the US and the UK are accents spoken from NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS. In the US we also have regional accents. Accents made by non-native speakers are FORIEGN ACCENTS influenced by their mother tongues. Regional accents ≠ foreign accents. Regional accents are not that difficult to understand whereas foreign accents are hard to understand.
Nye-kee and Nu-ick comes to mind.
im Irish and we pretty much pronounced all those brands the correct way.......its just the US that can't pronounce other languages and even English.
"Foreign" names and words are Americanized. I have a Spanish name and I pronounce it differently depending on who I'm talking to: Latino, Filipino, or "American". I was in Australia once at a camera workshop in Queensland. The instructor corrected my American pronunciation of "Nikon". He said "nee-kon", like you do. Cheers.
me when philippines mentioned 😂😂😂😂
But seriously, do we pronounce Spanish names that differently? I didn't know! Always hearin cruz, de los santos, del pilar, reyes etc. I've never had the chance to speak to someone fluent in Spanish, so I wonder how it's different....
As a Finnish person, it really blows my mind to see that almost every one of these brand names are naturally pronounced almost exactly the same in my country. It's said that it's relatively easier for a Finn to learn Japanese and vice versa than a speaker of almost any other language, because of the similarities in the way we pronounce things.
The pronounciation would be the same in romanian too. I think italian too.
kippis!
Pretty much any language that doesn't use long vowels have it easy too. It's just that English, French, and the like aren't one of those languages. Filipinos, Indonesians, and the like also hsve it easy.
Same voul sounds as Spanish as well
Ditto for Norwegian. Except for the "Asics" one. Nobody gets that one right without having been told the specific Japanese pronunciation.
I got anxious for a bit when she broke down the meaning of the two words in CALPIS.
omg 😂
It's like every time she talks Japanese, she switches to a totally different personality! I love that!
This is very common. It's called code switching. It's the same reason that young kids behave differently around their friends than they do with their parents.
@@mikicoal It has nothing to do with behaviour.
@@pauljordan4452 I didn't say it was. I said it was the "reason" that kids behave differently.
Hello from Romania! I am glad that I am pronouncing most of these right, because English is my second language. However, it's hard to get right some of the more complex names. But it was funny to hear you pronounce the ASICS acronym from Latin (Romanian is based on Latin). Anyway, I did not know that ASICS stands for that. I learned this Latin saying in school, it means "healthy (strong) spirit in a healthy body". Learning together is the best. Thank you. I have a great respect for the Japanese culture, btw, it is truly fascinating.
There are so many American brands that the Japanese say it differently. For example, Costco is pronounced Kosutoko, MacDonald's is Makudonarudo, etc. But I don't think they are being pronounced incorrectly. They just got localized to fit the language of the people, whether it's Japanese or English speakers.
Well said!
That's just accent
@@jamesgazeley no, its because they spell english words with katakana and when spoken, the katakana phonetics don't match our english pronounciation. They'de need a major revamp of katakana to be able to match english pronounciation.
@@gregh7457 Well, yes, that's how an accent comes about.
@@jamesgazeley uh.. not exactly. they have kana all over japan and they have different accents within japan. osaka v.s. tokyo for instance
Having lived in Japan for 12 years, I can see your perspective. A lot of those names have been "Americanized" for the US consumers since the last century, so we have accepted the pronunciation. The same goes true with the Korean brands as well; when I am in Korea, I hear the name brands pronounced differently on local TV.
But not BY the US consumers. Many non-American companies change their pronounciations for the US market because they think either we're not capable of pronouncing it correctly, we won't buy the product if it "sounds foreign," or it will just make more sense to Americans if it "sounds American." Personally, I'd rather they didn't Anglicize their names, but I have an Eastern European surname.
Everyone does it. No surprises there.
The biggest mispronounce Korean brand is Hyeundai. the proper way is HyeunDAE (dae as in day). Another one similar is tay kwon do. it is TAY kwan doe, not TIE
Ironically, you Americanised the spelling of Americanised. It doesn't have a zed in it, it has an ess.
Uniqlo being not expensive.
Me broke AF: Nani?!!
For its quality? Yes
relate much ☺️
It is expensive in somewhere in Asean. 😭 Me hard to buy it!
@@heika77 Yes but compared to other brands, it's reasonable.
@@heika77 consider the currency rate. The Ordinary retail price is like 10usd and sold 60myr+ in my country.
Its not just currency but also cost for duty,shipping and other stuffs
First time watching a video from your channel.
I was surprised why a video about pronouncing 10 brand names was nearly 10 minutes long but clicked on it anyway. I was very pleasantly surprised! 🙂
It was much more informative and interesting than I had expected.
I actually learned Japanese for a couple of semesters at university but sadly have forgotten so much but I think I can still pronounce Japanese words fairly OK, better than average. At least I hope so! 😂
I didn't expect the proper pronunciation for Nissin and Casio. I don't quite understand why the former wasn't introduced as Nishin for the international market. The moment I spelled Casio with an "sh" I realized that it would remind people of "cash" which maybe isn't a great association so I can understand the choice for marketing "Cashio" as Casio. (Also, the pronunciation would still be kind of wrong as English speaking would pronounce the "a" in Cashio like in cash and not the Japanese way.)
Regarding Calpico, this probably was a good marketing decision. When marketing products in different markets, it's advisable to see whether the names might have any unwanted connotations and avoid these if possible. In the case of Calpis / Calpico, you obviously would want to avoid labeling a drink with a name that sounds like pіѕѕ. This reminds me of an example of transnational marketing gone wrong that our marketing professor told us. Mitsubishi originally sold its Pajero line under this name globally but later changed it in Spanish-speaking countries (and the US as I've just seen) to Montero because pajero means wаnker in the literal sense (someone who masturbates) in Spanish. Looks like the good folks from Calpis / Calpico avoided this problem!
I'm not from the US and have very little interest in sports so I had no idea that Kobe Bryant was named after the beef. I know how Kobe (the city) is pronounced so just like you, I never made the connection! 😁
But the funniest one was Asics. I've seen the brand logo a few times and somehow thought that the twirl that looks like a partial derivative symbol (∂) actually is an O and the brand name is Oasis! My brain apparently decided that there's not "c" there. 🤦🏽♂😂
There was also the problem with selling the Chevy Nova in Spanish speaking countries, since a car that no va is not a good selling point! 😂
@@LizCowanSC Claro, no se quiere comprar un auto que no va! 😁
I think I've heard this one before but forgot about it.
One has to wonder how some large corporations don't check for this kind of issue.
I mean, I could understand that you come up with a brand name that has some obscene meaning in an obscure language, or even a language in a different part of the world, and that goes unnoticed. One can hardly check every language and it's debatable if the name of a candy bar sold in Peru has a dirty meaning in Lithuanian or something like this.
But how can you not check name compatibility with the target market?!?
I wonder if the culprit is some arrogant corporate people who cannot bear the slightest criticism. Otherwise someone in the Spanish or Mexican branch would have reported back to the head honchos saying, that Nova or Pajero is not a good idea.
Baffling!
The change of the brand name from Toyoda to Toyota was also linked to the number of brush strokes to write the name in Katakana, the former being 10 strokes and the latter being 8. As I have read in articles discussing the Toyota Katakana emblem, the number 8 is considered lucky in Japan, which was a contributing factor to the change. That emblem can be seen on the truck in my profile picture.
Wow that emblem is very cool
LATTER*
@@GabeWatchesAnime Thanks.
I feel like Mexican Americans were saying a couple of these the right way. The Spanish language seems to share more in common with Japanese when it comes to pronunciation
the phonemes are very similar
That's because historically the Japanese had some inspiration from Portuguese. And Portuguese is a language very similar to Spanish
Vowel sounds are extremely similar between the two languages. Native Spanish speakers tend to pronounce Japanese fairly well comparatively speaking.
Not all words.
Not really bro.... I don't see that at all. More like Korean and Japanese
I see a missed opportunity for a Monty Python reference during the Nikon section. She kept saying "Ni", "Ni" and I thought for a second she was trolling us. Asagi, if you have some spare time and want to enrich your understanding of obscure Western movie references, watch the "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" movie. It is old and campy, but if you have a broad sense of humor it is worth a watch (it is a comedy).
p.s. I will briefly explain the movie reference if you want the tldr version. Arthur and his knights adventure to find the Holy Grail, and come across mysterious people that call themselves the "Knights who say ni". These mysterious knights use a word of power, like a spell, to force people to recoil and cower. "Ni" "Ni" "Ni" are the words they use. Even Arthur can not defeat them, so he has to go on a sub quest to buy a shrubbery (!!!!) to appease them.
We are the knights who say ni. 🤣🤣🤣
Oh, what sad times are there when passing ruffians can say "Ni!" at will
to old ladies! There is a pestilence in this land! Nothing is sacred!
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable
economic stress at this period in history!
The Ministry of Silly Walks - God I love British humour
Better yet: watch the Life of Brian! Even better!
@@Luscious3174 "It's just a flesh wound"
Thank you for sharing, it’s fascinating to learn the history behind things.
Good explanation! Once my friend said “I drive Super Roof” that’s what I heard. But it was Subaru😆
I think we pronounce Nissin and Casio wrong because their Latin-lettered versions don't include an 'h'.
No its a name.., it should be pronounced on what the owner want you to say.
@@yohavergonzado8112 Completely agree but the problem lies with the official romanization of the East Asian languages (yes, there are official rules). If the romanization is wrong, it makes sense that people are going to pronounce it incorrectly. It's only until you learn the languages (Korean in my case) that you realise how wrong it sometimes is. Hyundai being the worst example I can think of.
@@yohavergonzado8112 My name is Riyo and I want you to pronounce it as Oreo, because it's a name and it should be pronounced as what the owner want people to say, despite of how wrong my spelling was.
Or should people pronounced it as "Rambo"? Let me think about my preference of how my name to be pronounced
@@yohavergonzado8112 The owner of the name doesn't make up the rules of the spoken language. Letters make up the sounds that's how language is supposed to work.
Spell it wrong, it will be said wrong.
I'm french and for french people it's very easy to pronounce japanese worlds because it's literary the same sound's combinaisons, not like english.
And not like French:D
This was so interesting! You’ve gotten yourself another follower :)
As a long-time retail worker in Canada, we had many discussions on how to pronounce words; like Nikon and Casio.
We had even had representatives from the companies tell us different pronunciations. It was so frustrating.
Thank you for these videos! It’s so nice to hear things from a native speaker. 💜
In your own country, pronounce it how your own people pronounce, but when you visit Japan, switch to Japanese pronunciation.
Same applies for other international brands like IKEA (in Sweden it sounds more like ii kay uh not eye KEY uh) or Nokia (in Finland it is NOH kya not No Ki uh).
I think advertising has a lot to do with how people think a company name should be pronounced, and if the company in a country can't agree on that, it must be difficult.
I know in the UK, years ago IKEA adverts all pronounced the name as "eye key uh", so as that's what the company's own adverts said, most people called it the same. At some point a few years ago, the adverts switched to the Swedish pronunciation, so now some will use the Swedish pronunciation, some either haven't seen the new adverts, as not everyone watches TV nowadays, or they have spent so many decades pronouncing it how the company told them to originally, that they either slip up sometimes, or just don't change the pronunciation. There are probably loads of different companies this applies to. Even more so in the USA, as in the UK Nikon and Adidas are pronounced in a similar way to the Japanese and German, but in the USA, they pronounce them in a very different way. The way they pronounce them is often the way they are pronounced in the company's own adverts. Not always, but it seems more of the time than in the USA, in the UK, the adverts now often have a more similar pronunciation to the original name. We still seem to be a bit far behind other European countries though. I don't know if it's partially a cultural thing. In the UK, for a long time (it's gradually improved over the last few years, although still a common issue), people would face ridicule and be seen as pretentious if they a native English speaker and use a foreign accent when pronouncing a foreign word. I don't know if this happens in other countries when a native speaker uses a foreign accent to pronounce a foreign word. It would be interesting to know if this is the case elsewhere too, or if it's a unique issue (and it is an issue here). Whereas our American cousins across the pond have the culture of bigging themselves up and being proud of their achievements, the British culture is more reserved and we'd rather play down our achievements and make out like something that we actually worked really hard for, isn't actually that impressive and try to change the subject. The culture is to be humble and modest. Coming across as pretentious is the last thing most people here would want, as it goes against our culture. I don't know if it's that which creates the issue, or if it goes back a long way to all the invasions and language changes and it's something that evolved from that and remains to this day. Up until fairly recently, there was still a lot of stigma around local dialects. As a result, a lot of people will speak their local dialect and Standard English, switching between the two. Some of the dialects will only be understood locally, and some like Northumbrian Dialect, are close to an older form of English. There's definitely a culture of having to fit in with the majority, so whereas if someone who's not a native English speaker pronounces an English word in an unusual way, most people will not make it known, as long as they understand what is said, the conversation will likely stop and it will be mentioned if a native English speaker pronounces a word with a foreign accent. Citroen for example is a French car brand. Most people know that and it's pronounced here with an English accent, which slightly alters the pronunciation. If an English person pronounced it with a French accent, so it was fully correct, people would call them pretentious, which is probably tied with queue hopping as pretty much the worst thing in our culture. It's a real issue. It stems from a good place of not wanting to make someone else feel lesser than you, even for a second, hence why people downplay their achievements. However, when it comes to other languages, it can really put a spanner in the works, and knock people's confidence to try and be more accurate with pronunciation.
it is interesting that the "Slovak" pronunciation of these words is correct, even though they are completely different languages
same for estonian and finnish, completely different language family but pronunciation is same - one letter one sound, not like in germanic languages
Italian too.
@@danieldogadajev1545 German pronunciation is very similar to japanese.
Every language has the same vowels.. bar English ..that's why
because English is not very phonetic, whereas a lot of other languages are
They literally tell you how to pronounce Pokémon in the word in English. Yet everyone seems to ignore the accent. At least the original VA for Ash in the English dub always said it correctly.
Awesome video. Thanks. Brazilian here, we speak mostly of those brands correctly :)
Im waiting for episode #2.
In french, we pronounce Toyota the same way that in japanese :) with the t instead of the d. I found your video quite interesting, thank you for your great content! ^^
As a Hungarian, I think we say these brands very similar as Japanese natives do. Plus we use our names as Japanese, first the family name, second the first name. And the far best cars I have owned ever were Honda and Toyota. Good job.
But you don't use father's name like our mutual friends to the east :)
Almost all languages use first surname and then name.
That's because most Hungarians were decedents of Mongolians.
@@user-ru1ki By almost all, you mean the five you're aware of?
@@deanronson6331 What do you mean five?
Being German I have noticed many times that our languages definitely share some sounds so Germans naturally pronounce these names closer to the Japanese version.
Heard germans pronounce Seiko as (Saiko)
Japanese people pronounce VW as "Folkswagen" rather than the way Americans say it: Volkswagen with a V sound, as in Victory.
@@midnightrambler6227 No they prounounce it
"Fokkusuwagan" Im sure!
@@srajanverma9064 It's actually Forukusuwāgen(フォルクスワーゲン）
@@midnightrambler6227 Ya this one seems correct.. bigger than I thought!
Very informative! Thank you for this useful information. Another Japanese camera brand that English speakers often mispronounce is "Mamiya", which most pronounce as if it were Italian: "maMIya," whereas if I'm not mistaken, the syllables in Japanese are evenly stressed.
I tried saying "Twitter" to some Japanese people in many different ways, but they were so confused about what I was trying to say until I showed them the app on my phone. The Toyoda thing is a particular thing we do in American English. Often when a 't" is between certain vowels sounds, the sound changes to a blended - "d" sound; for example, better becomes "bedder", Twitter becomes "Twidder", water becomes "water", battle becomes "baddle"
American voiced tapped t sounds like tapped r to speakers of a lot of other languages. Better becomes berer, water becomes waaaarer, got to becomes gara and so on.
@@Sylkis89amazing! So they don't hear the consonant sound flap 'T' at all? To me as a native speaker of English the /d/sound really stands out even though I know apparently its not quite a full /d/ sound
@@kabedondon most dialects of English don't have a tapped r. I guess Scottish English has and some very old fashioned English people sometimes tap the r in some contexts. But I never heard USAmericans do that, but it's rather theatrical nowadays. USamericans always pronounce it either as a liquid r or as a rhoticised schwa vowel, depends on a context. Never tapped. At least to my knowledge. If someone does it's a dead giveaway it's an immigrant lol
Also, mind the difference between tapped and trilled. Like in Spanish a single r is tapped, and double rr is trilled and it makes a phonemic difference.
Also, other dialects of English usually don't have the American tapped t. It's actually unique to North American dialects, for the most part at least, cause surely you will be able to find instances of it in other dialects, but it's just very rare. You're more likely to come across glottal stops instead in other English speaking regions.
Tapped r and tapped t don't sound exactly the same, physically it's a slightly different shape/position of the tongue, but are phonetically they are extremely similar to unstrained ears and it's an objective fact. They are very hard to distinguish when listening to a recording to most people who did not learn to be sensitive to the nuances when they're well accustomed to both sounds. Of course once you fo learn the difference your brain will pick up on the nuances and big them up in your head, create an illusion to make the distinction easier for you. And if whilst technical untrained you think they're not similar it's probably because your mind is already playing the same tricks on you by creating an illusion of tapped r sounding more like liquid r than it really does, and tapped t sounding more like regular d than it does.
Which infact I say tapped t because I refer to the letter, but it's accually more of a tapped d phonetically and you do have a tapped d in American pronunciation as well and there's no difference in sound between them, just in spelling you write them dow differently and it may affect how you think about them that they're separate despite sounding the same. Which is probably why you associate tapped t with d - cause you do in some contexts tap both, but because you also voice the tapped t it makes those variants of t and d sound the same, but you still notice it's not exactly the same as a regular plosive d.
But yeah if you ask for instance a Polish person to transcribe how they hear USAmerican accent with Polish orthography, if you give them a phrase like "We've got to move out" they will write down "łi gara muw ałt" (Polish ł sound like w in English and Polish w sounds like v in English lol). I know Spanish speakers also often think that water is pronounced warer and get confused when you tell them it's actually not lol but remember that they think of a different r than the liquid r USAmericans associate with this letter.
Bonus fact. Japanese lateral r is technically a yet different sound physically but it's also very similar sounding to tapped r to untrained ears. But because it's lateral that's why it makes it difficult for many Japanese people to tell the difference between r and l lol and once they learn how to pronoucne American style liquid r they also pronounce l that way a lot of times and it takes some work for them to actually learn the nuances that neither English r not l sound like the Japanese r, that Japanese r is just something in between the two.
It's kinda like if I pronoucned Polish sz and ś to you, you will probably hear both as sh and will have a hard time learning the difference lol
@@kabedondon when you learn a language's phonology, your brain makes perceptual adjustments whenever hearing speech, makes some approximations. Otherwise it would be impossible to communicate as everyone speaks a little differently, even the same person will speak less clearly when tired after jogging or drunk and so on yet you understand them. The same mechanism kicks in when you listen to a foreign language and your brain tries to apply approximations of your native langauges phonology and makes you misinterpret some things as a result and it is sometimes hard to learn to perceive it otherwise, learn to hear the nuances. For me a lot of English vowels still feel like they rhyme even if they don't for native speakers, despite me being able to easily tell the difference at this point and also pronounce them correctly the non-native feel towards them remains. Like in American English I'd say that 'matter' and 'butter' rhyme despite me being to easily tell that the a and the u are not pronoucned the same. They still feel simialr to me because we don't have so many vowels in Polish and the contrast between some English vowels would be just intonation in Polish perception.
@@Sylkis89 You could hear an 'r' instead of a 'd' in Southern accents, but not everyone in the States talks like that.
Funny fact.
In Poland, we all say Toyota like Japanese. Nikon, we also pronounce it correctly. And Esperanto was invented by a Pole ;)
Mi ŝatas Esperanton. 😁
It just has something to do with the letters being accurate to pronunciation which in English it isn’t. The same applies for German speakers they will also pronounce the words more or less correctly due to this fact.
It's funny that as a German native, I seem to have less problems pronouncing Japanese right compared to many other languages. It's because Japanese uses the same vocals as German. The entire Kana alphabet can be written in German letters, since "romanji" is actually the way we would pronounce it in German
Phonetic alphabet basically right
English is just orthographically deeper than, say, German, Spanish, Italian, Malay, or Turkish,
and then people apply those rules to a script where there is no such depth
While there are many similar sounds which makes it easier for us Germans than native english speakers, they are not quite the same. We are just able to reproduce the japanese sounds easier because we have almost all of them in our german language in some kind of variation (except the "r" sound). The "u" in german for example is more pronounced like an "ü" in japanese. Also they are called "romaji" which would be pronounced as close to "romadschi", so not quite.. I heard that finnish is closest to japanese in its sounds but I don't really know about that.
As an Indian (Hindi language speaker) I can say the same :) , pronunciation seemed natural
But you germans still pronounce the e suffix as uh.
é ist doch nicht so schwer auszusprechen brudi
I am from Hungary, and I happy to learn this from you. We use letters the same way like you do.
The Japanese pronunciations of Kobe, Toyota and Nikon are exactly the same as in German.
Japaner betonen jede Silbe gleich lang, ohne eine Silbe besonders zu betonen, soweit ich weiß. Im Deutschen betonen wir bei Toyota die zweite Silbe. Bei Kobe betonen wir die erste Silbe. Und bei Nikon sprechen wir das n anders aus, nicht so nasal wie die Japaner.
They are the same everywhere in the world, not only in German. Vowels pronunciation is basically the same in every language but English, because of the vowel shift English went through in the 16th-17th century. In mostly every language the standard way of pronouncing words written in Latin characters is the same it was in Latin: A like MAmA, E like fathEr or mEn, I like bEEn or pIn, O like pOt, U like pUt, or small variations of those. When you write Japanese words in Romanji, Latin alphabet, they pronounce it in the same way as everyone else -- but English.
Same as in Hebrew.
In general, native English speakers use different vowel pronounciation when it comes to Latin alphabet vowels. Let's take the word SHALOM in Hebrew for example, native English speakers would pronounce it more as SHAeLOWM.
Or in French, but French is just Italian with a German accent lol.
Also in Spanish. Although b can pronounced like v depending on speaker.
"The name calpis comes from 2 different word"
"Cal from Calsium"
Me: oh no
"Pis is taken from Sanskrit word salpis"
Me: i see...
Being from india salpis sounds more spanish than sanskrit
Then again there is pis in it so must be from sanskrit
@@capybara_izz_my_spirit_animal i imagine Pis is taken from the word "Piss"....
Salpis is like salty piss?
P*** is copied from pis
So the main reason for Toyoda to the change to Toyota was the amount of strokes it takes to write it. Went from 10 to 8(8 being lucky prosperity number in Japan)
Love your demure demeanor - subscribed, I could listen to you all day.
I find the diversity of pronunciation allows me to keep an open mind about how different the rest of the world can be (on a very small level of course). Rather than seeing these as mispronounced, I just see it as different cultures adding their diverse perspectives on it. In a way, it’s almost more fun to have different takes on pronunciation. In the US, there are millions of travelers from around the world coming through here every year, and hearing their unique accents makes it fun, and reminds you that there isn’t only one way to operate in this world. I have found that there is almost no culture that pronounces the same word in the same tone. Even in America, a Californian will say certain words differently than it would be said by a traditional accent from Texas, Louisiana, or New York as an example. We’re all “American” speaking English, and yet the same words are said differently. In any event, thank you for sharing the pronunciation of these words from the origin country’s perspective. It’s always nice to learn how the culture these words came from pronounces them. Please share more if they come to you!
Can you give an example of California and Texan saying the same word differently ? It’s not that different isn’t it? That’ll be like Kyoto and Tokyo accent. Very similar.
@@PcflsfThe word Ten. In much of Oklahoma and Texas it’s pronounced “tin”.
The pronunciation of “Louisiana” is another that varies.
Dialects really, not accents
My dad learned Esperanto in school in the UK in the 1960s. I feel like a lot of these mispronunciations stem from the fact that Roman alphabet languages often pronounce down to letter phonemes, whereas Japanese is based more around syllables as base units of sounds.
You sure it was Esperanto? The made up language devised in the late 19th century? Schools in Nottingham only taught latin, French and German in the 60s.
Yes, Nihongo (and Tagalog) are syllabic languages. Ta, Ka, Tse, Ba, and so on.
Romance languages, Korean, Chinese, etc. are letter based.
However, I also noticed that vowel pronunciations between Asian and Western languages are different too. Here in Asia, regardless if it is syllabic or letter-based, vowels are pronounced one way, like "a" is "ah" not "ey". So apple is "ah-pol" not "ey-pol", and so on.
Many, if not all, Western languages have weird vowel pronunciations which in turn causes confusion when one tries to read Asian languages.
For example, the Filipino food "taho" or "balut"/"balot". I've heard Western foreigners say it as "tey-ho" and "bey-lut" respectively.
Another example is ASEAN.
Asian pronunciations are: ah-syan and ah-si-yan. Westerners pronounce it as "ey-sea-an"; and without proper context, we can't understand it. 😅😅😅😅
@@YourOnlyONEofcl apple would be ey-pol in the USA. In British English it would be more "a pul" or "ah pul" depending on the region.
Arabic speaker here and I'm quite surprised of how well we pronounce these Japanese brand names correctly since English isn't our first language, so it's hard to mispronounce most of these
Yeah, Arabic and Japanese have a similarity where they are both phonetic language where every characters have a consistent sound/pronunciation. English on the other hand have a very inconsistent sound, like how every "e" in Mercedes each have different sound if you pronounce it in American accent.
Just an informative video guys! Going to Japan on our honeymoon in December, can't wait!
As a Brazilian, i already pronounce pokemon, nikon and Toyota Right
Same for French speakers (by the way, I was surprised the accent on pokémon is also present in non-french languages)
Most people in Brazil pronounce Toyota with an open O, like "Tóyóta", but it's a closed vowel "Tôyôta". For the French person above, I used ó and ô as in Portuguese just as a key for the Brazilian person above.
It seems only Americans say "Toyoda"
OK, but how do you pronounce Mazda?
Going from one language to another inevitably results in different pronunciations, and it's always fascinating to see how these words get transformed when the language changes. Some brands even encourage a different pronunciation to make life easier for non-native speakers of the language. For example, years ago, Hyundai did an entire ad campaign that "taught" English speakers to pronounce the brand "Hunday like Sunday," but any Korean speaker will know that's not accurate at all.
Oh yeah I don't get that lol... Huawei also released official video saying it's pronounced like waway..... When in Chinese it's hwaway... Odd
@@zeth479 That's so the Americans can pronounce it, less syllables
I mean, it's not like I couldn't have guessed the actual japanese pronounciation, but if I say kashio nobody knows what I mean anymore 🤷🏻♂️
Love the little „a“s thrown in to your English to make it sound more fluent, and out of habit. „What’a“ just sounds a lot cuter than „what“ 😌 My Japanese teacher lives in the U.S. for 30 years now and he still does it sometimes
Fun fact, seems like the correct Toyota, Asics and Nikon pronunciation is the same in french.
Pokemon and Kobe as well
Very interesting video.
I've never had a problem with Nikon or Toyota. I think the latter is an American English issue as they seem to pronounce 't' as 'd' quite often. I've never heard Toyota pronounced incorrectly in the UK.
One of the problems is when translating between English a language with a different script. Sometimes there's no matching sound but sometimes it's just badly done.
In Thai for instance there's a beer brand that's written in English as Singha so that's how most westerners say it but Thais call it beer Sing which comes from the Thai for lion.
In your video Asia's is a good example. The text you put on screen makes it pretty clear.
I love that you gave some background on the origin of each brand name - thank you!
Great video and thank you for sharing the correct pronunciations. This is funny because my Japanese wife made me aware of how many English Brand names Japanese people pronounce incorrectly. Like how you add "o" or "u"to the end of so many words like McDonaldso. Kawaii. It's also cho strange that we don't even pronounce Japan correctly.
Thank you for the explanation and context. I am enamored with the Japanese culture and language, it's a great combination of art and precision.
You can"t blame if non-Japanese consumers of Japanese brands pronounce them incorrectly because it is how the those brands are pronounced by manufacturers or in commercials or by salespeople is how those brands are recognized. One of the most famous mispronounced Japanese words in America is "karaoke", because society here sells it as "kareeokee" which doesn't even look like how karaoke should be pronounced, but most Americans are forced into hearing the wrong pronunciation therefore that is what they know. Other Japanese brands are westernized for sales purposes such as Toyoda being sold as Toyota. Nikon is always pronounced as Ny-kon instead of nee-kon since it was introduced. Sony isn't exactly correct Japanese spelling either, but that's how it's sold. Look at Nintendo. It should be pronounced Neen-te-n-do, but is prounounced Nin-ten-do.
Title should be
*"HOW JAPANESE PRONOUNCE THESE 10 JAPANESE BRANDS"*
Some of these brands had english or latin origins so english speakers don't speak it "wrong" they just speak it "different" base on the nature of their language.
so... the rest of the worlds languages who isnt japanese or english has a free pass too? right?
@@Ailasor right
@@Ailasor its like an accent theres no wrong accent 😊
Extremely interesting nice 😁👍
Never even knew that ASICS was a Japanese brand. Wore them for years while I was in the US Army. Best damn pair of running shoes I've ever worn.
I never even knew they had it outside of Japan.
Same. My first pair was bought on base and they’ve been my favorite running shoes for decades since.
@@alukuhito kinda ironic
@@Kettvnen Right? I've lived so long in Japan and have only noticed it here in Japan. The name seemed Japanese to me. I guess it's like how most Japanese think that Auld Lang Syne is a Japanese song, because they've only heard it in Japan and it's such a normal tune that can be heard daily in Japan, and even has Japanese lyrics.
@@alukuhito the fact that auld lang syne is popular in japan surprises me
This isn't really how language works, as others have pointed out. Loan words and foreign words are pronounced using the phonetic system of the language being spoken. Saying "Toe-yo-duh" instead of "Toh-yo-ta" when speaking American English isn't "wrong", that's how many people (depending on dialect) pronounce that arrangement of letters in English. By this same logic, Japanese people are all speaking "incorrectly" any time they say any Katakana word. This is an extra impossible standard/rule to try to follow in English because of how many of our words come from other languages that have differing original pronunciations.
If the subject was foreigners pronouncing these words incorrectly *while speaking Japanese* then sure, you could say saying these words in these ways is "wrong". But if someone is speaking English, and they suddenly switch their entire system of pronunciation, intonation, and emphasis, just for one word, it sounds really strange, as it would in any language.
I think Mazda is also an interesting one: matsuda!
Even SUZUKI
@@rafaellucero5098 não cara, se vc acha que a pronúncia certa de _suzuki_ é _sudzuki_ , vc tá enganado. A pronúncia certa é exatamente igual a gente fala aqui mesmo
What Karim Maassen said btw was news to me, I didn't no, but makes sence, because _matsuda_ is an actual japanese surname (tsu, not dzu)
I learned that after moving to Hiroshima 😂
@@99Gara99 "suzu (fast pronunciation) -ki"
As a kid who grew up in the US, that’s how my mom said it. Then realized it was a Japanese brand. 🙄
This video is aimed towards America and English only speakers. Its irrelevant to most other languages because almost all of them (at least in Europe idk really about other languages) pronounce all of these brands correctly, its actually completely natural fir us to pronounce them like this.
It is indeed incredible how many brands actually come from Japan AND how much influence Japanese art has on western culture.
I think opposite is true.
Ya the U.S. had more of a influence on Japan after WWII when we were helping rebuild there country.
Europe and America sure had some influences on life and art in Japan but one of the major differences between western influences on Japan and japanese influences on the west is that: Japan is and always was an assimilation culture. Meaning they apopt something and make it Japanese while wester culture tends to simply immitate. To get an idea I recommand to read Peter Schilling's "Encyclodepia of Japanese Pop Culture".
@@corneliusdobeneck4081 I'm not sure. There are many non-European things which were assimilated into Western culture. Take something like food in the States, you have everything from Chinese to Russian to French etc... even if much of the time it's been changed, eg pizza outside of Italy vs Italian pizza. I think there isn't a difference otherwise we have to ask... are Japanese different people to Europeans or everyone else? There is no basis for this in biology or sociology. Japanese are island people. But so are the British and Irish. So are the Taiwanese. Even the Swiss could be thought to be isolated as though Island people...
@@corneliusdobeneck4081 But I was even going to mention aspects of Asian dress which made it's way into European culture, food, music, algebra... etc... from East. Coffee is a good example. There is also tea. Westerners made these their own.... then Japan took from the West coffee and tea....
So, with the exception of Pokémon and a few brands I had never heard of I guess Europeans pronounce these brand names the same way the Japanese do ...
As a flemish speaking Belgian I think we do as well :-)
@@DLightBelgium Well, I did say "Europeans" - I thought that would include you guys :-) Of course the Brits will say "toyOTA" but at least they get Nikon right ...
@@LeifurHakonarson Just confirming what you said :-) Although French speaking Europeans tend to get everything wrong in pronunciation hehe
Deutch Oesterich Spain Italy France etc... ja, I think European has no problem pronounce it near to Japanese because almost all languange except English pronounce A B C as A B C not e bi si
Yakult in Japan pronounced " "Yakuruto"...but that's Japanese word... How do you expect a foreigner to pronounce it Yakuruto when it is clearly in the label " Yakult " unless you're a Japanese... 😁😀😊
Like daughter, laughter, caught? Why do we pronounce theses 3 words differently when they're all clearly written with "aught"?
@@iheartheenim I think what they are saying is we pronounce what is written on the package if it says Coke we are going to say Coke we aren’t going to say Coke a cola brewing company so if we see Yakult that’s what we would call it
Yeah made sense😅😁
@@iheartheenim The point is that if that name is transformed from katakana to romaji, then it should obviously be written as Yakuruto, not Yakult.
I don’t think anyone is expecting that
Great to hear the proper pronunciation.
I'm surprised at how many names are acronyms.
As an engineer, I think asics is the most misleading name for a sports wear brand. Asics sounds like the plural of 'asic', which is an acronym that stands for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit.
But only you and those studying or working in the engineering fields would know this Acronym, so yes. ASHIKKUSUU all the wayyyy🤣🤣🤣🤣
Exactly , When first time heard of this brand. I thought it a "smart sneaker " kind of , embedding the ASIC chip inside. it's time The self lacing sneaker in Back to The Future II come to reality.
Crazy bc my Spanish speaking brain thought these acronym were in Italian, because they easy to translate for me. "Alma Sana en cuerpo sano" healty soul in a healthy body"
Anima sana in corpore sano
A sound mind in a sound body
@@windbreaker57Latin, exactly!
no no no. If ASICS comes really from the Latin "Anima Sana In Corpore Sano", the pronunciation becomes Roman Latin/Modern Italian:
"AHHSEEKS"
Not "Asiksuru"....
In fact in Italy we read "ahhseeks" and when I was younger I always thought it was an Italian brand 😁
Latin have been spoken over a large area in a loong time so the prononciation have varied a lot. So hard to tell.
Um, she said ashikusu, not asiksuru... And it's still a Japanese company.
Thought she said 'ashiksu' that should be too far from the actual Latin pronunciation
Ok, the company is Japanese but the name is not a Japanese word. Not unlike Hello Kitty.
It's similar to how people expect us to pronounce France brand correctly (hermes, louis vitton), Asagi-san is teaching the correct way to pronounce Japanese products and I think that's very interesting. And good to know in indonesia, we pronounce Kobe, Nikon, Toyota and Pokemon correctly, because we only have 5 vowels and they sound just as they are XD
... pronounce French* brands
It's kinda funny how as a Dutchman, I'd be pretty close with most pronunciations, except for the ones where extra sounds were added (Niss*H*in, Yakult*O*). Especially brands like Nikon or Toyota would be spot-on for anyone speaking Dutch.
An interisting one not mentioned here is Tamiya. For years I've been told I was pronouncing it wrong: T*ah*miya, with a little stress on the first syllable a bit, but not by much. But no, everyone always told me it's Ta*MI*ya, with a strong stress on the second syllable. And then came RUclips with lots of English content, and more often than not something like T*EH*miya. But years later I visited Shizuoka and quickly found out my original pronunciation actually wasn't so far off after all....
My Asian friend speaks perfect English but when he talks to other Asians that don’t speak his own language he speaks broken English to them lol I guess that helps them understand ? 😂
probably. it a weird human trait!
I find myself doing a mixture depending on how popular the asian loaned engrish version is lol
It's true. I'm a teacher in Philippines and I can speak fluent English. But again, English is not Asian's first language. Everyone was different. Some are already good at it and some are still learning. In order for them to understand, I have to make my English a little broken to emphasize the words I want them to understand more.
For example; instead of saying "No thanks, I ate already. How about you?" I will say "No. Me done eating. You?"
But I believe this goes to not just Asians. I believe people around the world that doesn't use English as their first language, also use broken English to communicate with people who are still learning it.
Also, does your Asian friend that speaks perfect English has the same Asian ethnicity with the other Asians he talk to? That must be a factor to it. Not all Asians speaks the same language.
PhD students joining the primate sign language development programme were taken aback when they discovered the chimpanzees would talk down to them and sign slowly and "loudly".
Because it's a different language lololol even though it uses English words. It might be"broken" English but it's not broken Singlish or Malaysian English, Japanese English or whatever language that they were speaking hahahahaha
My favourite is Mazda. Americans say "mass-dah", but it's really "matsda" or "matsudah", although the "u" gets reduced.
So basically another instance of Japanese spelling their brand names different from original pronunciation.
But the japanese got the name from a non japanese word. The god Ahura Mazda.
So the foreign pronunciation is the more right one
@@zenithzeitgeist7489 No Mazda is the right spelling, the japanese pronunciation is ironically the wrong one since they indeed are referencing the god: Ahura Mazda
@@carlosandleon One of the founder's names was also "Jujiro Matsuda", so it has japanese connotations as well.
@@TheOnlyToblin Oooh that makes it even more interesting
Japanese tend to add G after N in their pronunciation, so it sounds NG rather than N. In Indonesia we call Jepang for Japan. Its sounds like what Japanese people's who read JAPAN.
Its not really adding a g, its just the symbol ん is pronounced sort of inbetween N and M which kinda sounds like ur saying NG
It's like the l/r thing, Japanese language doesn't distinguish between the two.
they can't differentiate N and NG
living in japan for more than a year now and i noticed it too. they call my son Mingy instead of Miggy
makes sense, in spanish saying Japon seems to have a latent g sound at the end...
I suspect a lot of it comes from the fact that words are pronounced very differently depending on region in English speaking countries. Just within england itself, words are pronounced very differently, just 20 or 30 miles away. I think that other languages, such as Japanese, are much more subtle than english, where small variations in how a word is said can make it a totally different word or meaning. English generally isn't like that. It can be sometimes, but often isn't. I think these 2 things lead people to be much more relaxed with the pronouncement of words in English to the point where often other language speakers pronounce english words "more accurately" from a technical point pf view than native english speakers.
This was a wonderful video by the way.