A Broken English Lesson

After reading one of Mega Brad’s post and speaking with a coworker this morning, I realized that I had a knack at understanding broken English. I think it had to do with the foreign language that I took when I was in high school. My high school offered Japanese as a choice for a foreign language. The best thing about the class was listening to a little Japanese lady speak about her weekend trips using crazy sounding English. It took me two years to be able to halfway understand her English, but learning broken English has been a useful tool. In the Japanese language there is only one letter that doesn’t end a vowel. That letter is “n”. They are also lacking quite a few consonants and consonant groupings that we have in English; for instance “L” and “TH”. They make do by using other sounds to give the effect of saying those letters and consonant groupings by using “R” for “L” and “SHI” for “TH”. I’ll give you a short story as I heard it in Japanese class from my teacher.

(Rules to read story: A sounds like A from “ball”, I sounds like I in “sheik”, U sounds like U in “Peru”, E sound like E from “heh”, O sounds like O in “Joe”. If you don’t pronounce it like this I’m sure it gets even more crapped up. Note: She married into her last name which really just made it funnier. Her first name was Taeko and last name Horowitz)

Horowitz Sensei: Resen kurasu, Ai hafu somushin tu teru yu. Tisu wikendu Ai wentu Ataranta. Mi an chideren wentu sekusu furagasu.

DPT: Did you go on the “rora” coaster, Horowitz sensei?

Horowitz Sensei: No, Ai dontu rike te rora kosuta.

DPT: Did you go anywhere else in “Ataranta”?

Horowitz Sensei: Hai. Wi wentu koka kora fakutori.

DPT: Oh the CocaCola head quarters?

Horowitz Sensei: Hai. An te undaguranda en Ataranta. Taetu wasu te rasetu chingu wi du.

I’m so glad I spent two years in learning a foreign language that I would never use. I had to stop the story there ‘cause I was getting a headache just from writing it. Can anyone figure out what Horowitz Sensei was saying?