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HAHAHA @ the katakana! …the rest I can’t read.
I never would have bothered to read the katakana if you hadn’t mentioned this. Looks like over a decade later high school japanese is still serving me well for hilarious puerile purposes!
….just wow! XD
I’m with Alan, I would have completely missed that! The third example is something about “sad Twilight,” but as it’s worded I’m not sure it’s referring to the books.
Shouldn’t there be an extra dash at the end of the second line?
Yeah, probably.
It’s hilarious, btw.
Actually it is hilarious that they invented a phonetic based writing system only few thousand years after everyone else. And actually it is syllabic, so it is still inferior. L2 language East Asia.
Syllabic is inferior? Huh. That seems to be an entirely legitimate and not entirely baseless claim.
Wil surely need that skill by 2020
^this
They will need to replace this anyway, it’s not practical. It’s hard on font designers, typists, software designers and firstgraders. Especially Chinese.
Actually, Chinese writing is easier than japanese. Japanese has all the chinese symbols + hiragana/katakana and since chinese symbols were never meant to be used in japanese, every symbol has an “on” and a “kun” reading, while you only have 1 reading in Chinese.
but they really should change Japanese, even the average Japanese adult can’t read a newspaper out loud. They understand what it means but the kanji in it is so complex
Source? Being a university student enrolled in a Japanese language, culture, econimics, etc class, this is news to me, and I have several Japanese professors, they don’t seem to have any problems with it :p
In China they tried it once in the 20th century, but it didn’t achieve its goal.
People who have practice can also write chinese words pretty quickly on a computer.
Thank you, now I have a reference for idiots who can’t tell the difference.
Yes, because EVERYONE should be able to tell the difference between Asian writing systems, whether or not they’ve actually been to these countries, seen their media, or even had occasion to look closely at them.
I promise you, there are better things to be arrogant about.
There’s nothing better to be disdainful of than cultural ignorance. Make the effort to learn.
…except that there are hundreds of different writing systems in the world. It would be nice if everyone could at least recognize the most widely used, but there are probably plenty of people who are not “culturally ignorant” that can’t. Not everyone can know everything about every culture.
So, you actually learned all of the many, many written languages in the world? Because if not, do not be so arrogant about something so trivial as this ever again…please…
Btw, chinese mandarin may be spoken by a lot of people but japanese and korean are not, so why exactly should anyone without an interest in it learn it? Because you are ignorant if you don’t know it?
because they are very important languages??
you should really be able to differentiate between the world’s most important languages. Otherwise you lack common knowledge
They are not “very important languages”, they are important only in their sphere of influence, just like minor languages of smaller countries. The average human living outside of China, Japan and Korea has little to no reason to know the overly complex languages spoken there. Not knowing any of the languages is not “lacking common knowledge” it’s lacking uncommon knowledge since if it were common, this wouldn’t be posted in the first place.
The one language on earth that everyone could do well learning if they hadn’t already is English, since it’s spoken by more people than any other language on earth by a gigantic margin. No other language is used in an international way like English is. Last estimate of people capable of speaking English was 5 to 6 billion people. Does Chinese, Japanese, or Korean have that level of penetration? Not even close.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
Apparently Mandarin is quite popular.
That list is sorted by native speakers of the language. Chardrak claim was that English is spoken by more people than Mandarin, including people who speak it as a second language. Your link says that there is 1.5 billion speakers of English worldwide, which makes it more common than Mandarin (1.2 billion speakers). Not a gigantic margin as claimed, but it’s still more common.
I would argue that Latin and Greek are more important to learn than Chinese, Japanese, or Korean even though it is spoken by a very small percentage of the population, simply because there are many languages that use parts of Latin and Greek. Especially in technical fields like Medical, Engineering, and Math and Science.
Well, when China becomes the world’s leading economy and the US economy struggles the existing trade deficit, you’ll be wishing you learnt Chinese.
Japanese may be, but Korean? And that totally depends on how you measure importance, otherwise you have to include a lot of languages. And it is highly likely that, depending where you live, in your daily life you will hardly ever encounter any of these languages, so calling it common knowledge is a big stretch.
Not really an “Engrish Funny”. It’s really a useful explanation of the different graphic systems, We Westerners have such difficulty differentiating Asian faces, writing systems, and other cultural differences as witness the consternation of the Laotian dealing with two cultural morons who insisted he must be Chinese or Japanese, in a recent Failblog (can’t find it now)
The Katakana Japanese characters says `Fark you n1gga`. so might be considered an Engrish `Funny`.(not that I personally find it funny)
to be exact..that’s cantonese, not used officialy in China.
Official chinese is mandarine.
To be more exact.
It is just traditional Chinese characters, used in Hong Kong and Taiwan and are becoming more popular again in the mainland too.
Mandarin and Cantonese can be written on both traditional and simplified characters.
The difference between them is purely a matter of pronunciation. My wife speaks Mandarin and several dialects from around Shanghai–yet she has no problem at all with Cantonese movies with subtitles.
cantonese pronounciation is most of the time COMPLETELY different. for example 5 in mandarin is pronounced similar to “u” and in cantonese it is pronounced like “m”. if you have subtitles you can understand it because the traditional characters are similar to the simplified ones(and often used if something has to look pretty, like on a packages or on the name of a company)
Actually it’s “wu” and “ng” but close enough
Thats coz the subtitles are in Mandarin and English……..
A Cantonese speaker would also understand the subtitles.
you forgot languages like thai!
Oh yeah like anyones gonna come across any thai writtings…
well, i have some video games from thailand – and some of them are labeled in thai.
Well, have you seen Georgian or Armenian writing?
oh yeah, those are weeeeeird! *___*
I’m surprised they did nothing on Vietnamese either: it’s the most simple one to tell for westerner after all
Having been to resteraunts of each culture , i recognize them all.
how progressive of you.
I don’t know who these Chai-Knee are, but they make some GOOOD pork!
Now, THAT’s what I call culture, heving been to a restaurant!…
Damn! those japanese are racist (8
lacist…
*レーシスット
*雷希斯特
plick
Um… this is pretty offensive to anyone who can read Japanese… FYI
What does it say?
Fakyuー niーga
the literal translation is “cum stain = white person” and it’s supposed to mean white people look like cum stains…
And actually surely おいしいなみかん is wrong? おいしい isn’t a な形容詞. Unless there’s something called なみかん which I’ve never heard of in which case I’ll shut up…
You’re separating them wrong. It’s “oishiina mikan” not “oishii namkan.”
No, sorry, I didn’t make it very clear. I thought it should just be oishii-mikan, no ‘na’ required, so then I said maybe there’s something called a ‘namikan’ which I’ve never heard of and thus it isn’t wrong at all. Sorry for lack of eloquence
Even if oishii could be made into a ‘na’ adjective, like ookina 大きな for example, then it would surely be ‘oishina’, without the final ‘い’. Does that make sense or am I talking total cr*p?
you’re absolutely correct on this! i noticed it, too
Actually, the 3 examples in japanese are wrong… The second sentence should be katakanised as ファックユー二ガ and I guess he meant 悲しい in the last one…
The third one is the title of a Morning Musume song… it’s not incorrect the way it’s written
Can’t speak for the others but Japanese says ‘tasty oranges’ (unless I misunderstood that), ‘fakyuu nigaa’, and ‘sad twilight’
it’s tangerines, not oranges
*or just tangerine, we don’t know if it’s plural or not
Well strictly speaking what Japanese call mikan, in Britain at least, is called a satsuma – I just used a general term instead. True about the plural, sorry, haha :p
no alphabet, how do they do it?
obvious troll is obvious
I’m a Japanese minor going into my senior year of college and I can seriously not keep up with how many times I’ve been asked this question… The people who have asked me in real life have been serious… v.v
actually 2 sort of alphabets, katagana and hirigana (forgive my spelling, it’s been a while since I studies it.) The symbols do correspond to sounds the way our familiar letters do, although usually in combination. Then there are kanji, which are the Chinese originated symbols which represent whole words or parts of words. One of the “alphabets” is used for words with Japanese origin, the other for words of foreign origin. Can’t remember which is which at the moment. It’s an incredibly complicated system, to be sure. This is why I was interested in studying it, and also probably why I put studying it on the back burner for a few years now.
Hah, that was actually useful and confirmed my gut feel about it. Thank you forever anonymous stranger because I am too lazy to scroll up and see what name was there.
Unless it’s Japanese Kanji symbols, which look like Chinese.
Because they’re Chinese symbols adapted to the Japanese language. Go figure.
SPEEK AMARRIIKAAAANNNNNNN!!!!!!
I think Thai has a lot of curves if my memory is correct *too lazy to confirm*
This is not a fail, therefore it does not belong on failblog, stop posting this crap!
ESTO
This guy obviously doesn’t know what the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese translate to.
Kanashimi Twilight is the title of a Morning Musume. single – that’s probably where the person who made this got it from
初音ミク
wooooo!
It says “Hatsune Miku”
I don’t know what is written in the bottom line.
white trashes fail
I’m sorry, but Engrish, you fail for not knowing that there is a racial slur in this post. Take it down. And oishii is not a na-adjective, period. Lame.
some Chinese symbols/character has boxes or square
The Korean says something like “f**k you kitty” or “f**k you baby cat”. It’s not completely correct but still weirdly offensive.
Literally ‘f**k’, or maybe you’re mistaking it for ‘sexy’ or ‘intercourse’? Too many Americans/English speaker just confuse the term for ‘intercourse’ to mean ‘f**k’. While ‘f***ing’ is slang for ‘making sex’, ‘sex’ in of itself is not an offensive word.
so, for all you know… it could be Korean for ‘Sex Kitten’. Hardly offensive unless you happen to hate sex kittens.
I HATE SEX KITTENS! GAREEQERESAFSEFSADFAWFOASJVFSDNC!!!!!
i hope that i have fulfilled the required hate your post demanded.
My Korean husband translated it. It is offensive.
Hilarious, except for the common mistake that people don’t know the difference between a symbol and a character. Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters are NOT symbols. Symbols are something completely different.
lol!
LOL at the Korean. It’s the only one I can actually read and understand. But I can already tell the difference between Japanese and Chinese.
Still, that Korean. XD
性交のためにだけ英語を学習！
Why bother?
Heh, that’s amusing, I’ve always told them apart this way, ever since I started to learn Japanese…
This is the only way I’ve been able to get other people to tell the difference. I’m sick of the “can you read that?” question. I live in Vancouver, so, pretty much everyone lives here.