Engrish.
Engrish is what brings us together...today. Japan is well known for using English words in a non-conventional fashion (similar to how people use Asian characters for tattoos). The advent of the internet has unfortunately ruined much of the best Engrish in Japan. There are still odd things, but the real hard stuff is mostly in Korea and China. I will let you know when I get back from Korea. Anyhoo. I have collected a few Engrish things in my journeys as a teacher. There are no pictures because I was supposed to be teaching at the time I was writing them down in a notebook.
The kids sit on a little portable pad for their chair while they are in school. This pad also doubles as their earthquake helmet when they run to safety (as mentioned in a previous post). Being highly fashionable youngsters, several of these have English words on them. Let's see if we can pick out a theme.
One one seat cushion:
Heat
Heat
Lovery (awesome!)
Uptown Girl
Femme Fatal
Decision
Beautiful
Nice right? Good for an independent and strong modern Japanese woman? Wrong. That is the seat cover of a 14-year-old boy who is on the baseball team. Yep. It makes negative sense. Some of the words are even written with cool fonts that make the words look like they just stormed the beach under artillery fire.
Sometimes the students have funny things that they say in their writings or speaking. We did presentations yesterday on their favorite things. About half of them were coherent thoughts. Sometimes they would launch off into words I have never heard in Japanese or English. I think these were English sounding Japanese words, or Japanglish.
Earlier in the year, we asked the students what would you do if... One student said, "If I were invisible, I would drive a car quietly." Me too man...me too.
2 comments:
I loved looking for that kind of English over there. Once I went to a cafe that had hand painted the words to the 12 Days of Christmas around the top like a wall border.
I think it's like Americans with French words. You'll see French words on clothes, bags, etc. and we don't know what they mean but like the look. I think English is like that in Japan, sometimes.
Very funny stuff!
I love that you put the word "heat" in a series of words that have to do with women. Seeing my cat go into heat was one of the most traumatizing experiences of my life.
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