Does Learning Japanese Force You to Be racist?

A silly game for getting used to a new way of speaking

I have a love-hate relationship with katakana.

What the heck is katakana you ask? Well, you know how English has an alphabet? Japanese has katakana — they also have hiragana and kanji — but katakana is what they use for words that have a foreign origin.

Just imagine if every time we wrote rendezvous it wasn’t just a ridiculous spelling but also a completely different alphabet. That’s basically katakana.

Japanese has imported a lot of words over the years, a lot from China, but more recently from English and other European languages. Things like Starbucks, IKEA, and Christmas all have their place in Japan, and while there’s a big difference between the pronunciation — all of these things have their own katakana name.

As Japanese students, we have to learn these words.

マックドナルド makkudonarudo (McDonalds)
クリスマス kurisumasu (Christmas)
ロケット roketto (rocket)
テレビー terebii (television)

We learn that this is the way to say these names in Japanese. These aren’t English words — the correct term for them is loan words. They are words that have been incorporated into Japanese by being loaned from another language. Make no mistake though — they are Japanese words.

If you want to learn Japanese, you must learn katakana.

And as a young student, you get into the habit of guessing the katakana form of words you don’t know, a lot of the times it works out that you can just plug in a word the right way and you’ll get away with it.

Forget how to say 延伸? That’s fine, you know that already means to stretch, so just go ahead and say ストレッチ(sutorecchi) — people will think you’re pretty smart. Forget how to say 頭がいい? Just say スマート(sumaato) — wait no don’t do that sumaato doesn’t mean smart even though it’s similar, it means skinny…

In my group of friends, we spent a lot of time trying to talk to each other using as much Japanese…

Related posts:

In de metro vind je normaal geen lachende gezichten. Mensen staren voor zich uit, tokkelen wat op hun smartphone of lezen slaperig een boek of krant. Dat was de voorbij dagen in de Londense Tube wel…

You thought to finalize your wedding venue all you need to do is choose one that fits your budget in the vicinity of your residence, right? Sounds easy but not exactly. It’s better to evaluate the…

During this past year, we realized that we were missing out on a huge opportunity to answer our clients’ questions and open the door for more leads through a marketing tactic we hadn’t tried yet —…