A reflection on Engrish.

[unbibium]

We'll all agree that mistakes like "all your base are belong to us" are unprofessional translations.

But I pose that making these mistakes is absolutely essential to obtaining speaking fluency in a language.

Indeed, anyone who's studied childhood development will say that it's a good sign when children start using words that don't exist like "gived" and "gooder". It means they're no longer parroting words, but picking up rules and learning to generalize them, learning to experiment, to construct.

And I think back to how that same kind of experimentation, in the classrooms I've been in, is not encouraged.

I hope that people know better than to trot out All Your Base in front of beginning English-speakers, especially in Japan where it likely originated. But I know that it doesn't take much cultural ignorance to make someone feel unjustifiedly inhibited.

Comments

[miwasatoshi.livejournal.com]

"All Your Base" is Japanese in origin.

As for the phenomenon of Engrish is concerned - it's far deeper than most Americans think. It's not just on T-shirts and store fronts.

You can find Engrish on government websites.

The problem is that, while English is compulsory in Japan, most English teachers do not spend nearly enough time on grammar, especially since English is conceived in an entirely different writing and linguistic system than the Japanese.

There is no such thing as a "letter" in the Japanese language, for example - their writing system is based on syllables. The very idea of a "letter" is a foreign concept, especially when you try to inject the whole "this letter has different sounds" idea into it.

It's much more than just the concept of experimentation (especially when there are set ground rules) that inhibits the teaching of English in Japan.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Perhaps. But I'd hate to see a student discouraged when he's gone through the whole process of understanding letters, pronouns, word order and such, only to be ridiculed in a chat room when he forgets to make something plural by some teenager who thinks "u" is a word anyway.

Though I keep forgetting there's no cure for human weakness.