Bored Panda was very interested to figure out just how rare or widespread English errors like this actually are. That's why we reached out to a foreign exchange student who has recently moved from Europe to Japan's capital, Tokyo.
We had a chat about communicating with the locals in English, as well as the language mix-ups that she's personally seen with her own two eyes. The exchange student preferred to remain anonymous.
She told Bored Panda that, so far, it's been difficult finding Japanese people who choose to speak in English. "It’s difficult to communicate with the locals because they either do not speak English at all, but even those who speak some English are too embarrassed to try speaking it," she shared her firsthand experience.
Though it's easy to think that hilarious spelling and translation errors are to be found around every corner abroad, that's not really how things work. The reality is actually far more mundane: jaw-droppingly hilarious mistakes are few and far between. Though this rarity probably helps make them all the funnier.
"I haven’t noticed that many bad translations," the exchange student shared with us about her experience living in Tokyo and traveling around Japan so far.
"Sometimes, 'R' and 'L' are mixed up in an English word and it makes me wonder how did they miss that because I assume they use a translator/dictionary when making signs and stuff," she pointed out that, in Japanese, both of these letters are pronounced interchangeably. "But it’s not that common," she added.
"I haven’t seen any funny mistranslations, except one Italian-style restaurant had a really overall botched English menu translation," she said.
The r/engrish subreddit has amassed over 736k members in the nearly one-and-half decades since the online community was first created.
The moderators of the group ask people to follow the rules, including avoiding posting any intentional English mistakes. All errors have to be genuine. What’s more, tiny typos or unfunny spelling mistakes also aren’t the focus of the subreddit. The mess-ups have to be big, bold, and beautiful! Frankly, the more embarrassing and hilarious, the better
Everyone makes English mistakes. Whether you’re a foreigner or born in an English-speaking country doesn’t matter much. Your ability to write, edit, proofread, and translate well depends more on your work ethic and ability to learn than anything you’re born with.
Sure, native speakers might have a head start. But we’ve all seen way too many cases of people who can’t string a proper sentence together to believe that they have any long-lasting advantage. Talents and opportunities mean nothing if you don’t put in the hard work to nurture them.
Writing for Aeon online magazine, John McWhorter a professor of linguistics and American, noted that English speakers “know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively.”
“The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal,” he points out.
“Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. Speaking came long before writing, we speak much more, and all but a couple of hundred of the world’s thousands of languages are rarely or never written. Yet even in its spoken form, English is weird,” McWhorter writes.
“It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels ‘normal’ only until you get a sense of what normal really is.”
He continues: “We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it’s us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family—Indo-European—and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.”
“More weirdness? OK. There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third‑person singular. I’m writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talk-s—why just that? The present‑tense verbs of a normal language have either no endings or a bunch of different ones (Spanish: hablo, hablas, habla). And try naming another language where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question something. Do you find that difficult? Unless you happen to be from Wales, Ireland or the north of France, probably.”
