It’s easy to say カラオケ, but even after several years it sounds unnatural to me
I had a friend repeat twice she had visited ポルツガル and I was at a loss. Finally she said “next to Spain”
Los angeles, California, fiberglass casting tape,
ウイルス aka Virus
One that kinda surprised me for some reason. My wife pronounces chaos as Kaosu. Turns out that’s just how Japanese pronounce it even though I think it could have easily been ケオス instead of カオス.
アルゼンチンespecially when watching soccer/football
I’m just wrapped around the axle that
消しゴム
靴の底のゴム
And
ガムテープ
Are different …one is gomu and one is gamu
マクドナルド💀
ブリュッセル (Brussels), the リュ is so confusing!
Had the exact same experience ordering a creme brulee cheesecake earlier today.
That said, ブリュレ
カトラリー makes me irrationally angry
My own last name is pretty awful in katakana. I always have to slowly spell it out when I need to tell it to someone over the phone.
ニュース its hard not to say it as ニューズ
I cannot, for the life of me say: ルール
Especially when I try to say: ルールはルールだ。
カリキュラム is such a hard one for me to say… and unfortunately i need to use this word a lot at my job
客室乗務員
It’s a little harder because it’s unfamiliar, but I like when the Japanese pronunciation hews close to the original language that isn’t English.
It might be just me, but I have a harder time saying words written in カタカナ in general than words written in ひらがな 😅
キャベツ, this one just pisses me off
ウラジオストク or Vladivostok I guess you don’t have to use it frequently, but it throws me for a loop.
Any of the W->ウ ones for me, especially when they have a small kana vowel modifying the ウ.
I had to say ウォールストリートジャーナル (Wall Street Journal) yesterday and my mouth did not want to say that ウォール properly.
I say it all the time, but I still feel like my pronunciation of クレジットカード leaves something to be desired. Katakana words are so much harder than other Japanese vocabulary for some reason.
マクドナルド。Turns a 3 syllable word into a 6 syllable one.
ヒエラルキー(which comes from German to be fair) is very annoying to pronounce compared to its English counterpart, hierarchy.
I always struggle with ミルフィーユ but I guess that’s hard to say in French too
Literally all of them. Still after all these years I read out the phonetics of a Katakana word 5 times, have no idea what it’s supposed to be, stare at it for a while then either ask my wife or google it, and the answer 95% of the time is something extremely frustrating because it should be an easy English word, or there are 5 other actual native Japanese words that mean the same thing but don’t get used anymore because it’s more fashionable to use the foreign word instead.
I find it interesting how close many of those words sound to Brazilian Portuguese. Your example (plástico) is so close it got me thinking whether it came from English or pt-br, even though I’m certain it’s not from the latter
28 comments
アレルギー (allergies)
It’s easy to say カラオケ, but even after several years it sounds unnatural to me
I had a friend repeat twice she had visited ポルツガル and I was at a loss. Finally she said “next to Spain”
Los angeles, California, fiberglass casting tape,
ウイルス aka Virus
One that kinda surprised me for some reason. My wife pronounces chaos as Kaosu. Turns out that’s just how Japanese pronounce it even though I think it could have easily been ケオス instead of カオス.
アルゼンチンespecially when watching soccer/football
I’m just wrapped around the axle that
消しゴム
靴の底のゴム
And
ガムテープ
Are different …one is gomu and one is gamu
マクドナルド💀
ブリュッセル (Brussels), the リュ is so confusing!
Had the exact same experience ordering a creme brulee cheesecake earlier today.
That said, ブリュレ
カトラリー makes me irrationally angry
My own last name is pretty awful in katakana. I always have to slowly spell it out when I need to tell it to someone over the phone.
ニュース
its hard not to say it as ニューズ
I cannot, for the life of me say: ルール
Especially when I try to say: ルールはルールだ。
カリキュラム is such a hard one for me to say… and unfortunately i need to use this word a lot at my job
客室乗務員
It’s a little harder because it’s unfamiliar, but I like when the Japanese pronunciation hews close to the original language that isn’t English.
Like, the three-headed hound of hell, Cerberus: [ケルベロス](https://youtu.be/GrWI3iFhn9Q?si=l3H7WoqoThmjwqOO)
It might be just me, but I have a harder time saying words written in カタカナ in general than words written in ひらがな 😅
キャベツ, this one just pisses me off
ウラジオストク or Vladivostok
I guess you don’t have to use it frequently, but it throws me for a loop.
Any of the W->ウ ones for me, especially when they have a small kana vowel modifying the ウ.
I had to say ウォールストリートジャーナル (Wall Street Journal) yesterday and my mouth did not want to say that ウォール properly.
I say it all the time, but I still feel like my pronunciation of クレジットカード leaves something to be desired. Katakana words are so much harder than other Japanese vocabulary for some reason.
マクドナルド。Turns a 3 syllable word into a 6 syllable one.
ヒエラルキー(which comes from German to be fair) is very annoying to pronounce compared to its English counterpart, hierarchy.
I always struggle with ミルフィーユ but I guess that’s hard to say in French too
Literally all of them. Still after all these years I read out the phonetics of a Katakana word 5 times, have no idea what it’s supposed to be, stare at it for a while then either ask my wife or google it, and the answer 95% of the time is something extremely frustrating because it should be an easy English word, or there are 5 other actual native Japanese words that mean the same thing but don’t get used anymore because it’s more fashionable to use the foreign word instead.
I find it interesting how close many of those words sound to Brazilian Portuguese. Your example (plástico) is so close it got me thinking whether it came from English or pt-br, even though I’m certain it’s not from the latter
Anything with a ‘V’ or ‘th’