In the last year or so since TikTok and other “reel” based platforms have become more popular, people have realized they can use their Japanese knowledge to teach people the language and culture, which is actually cool, but a lot of these people aren’t even Japanese and are spreading misinformation.
To clarify, IMO there’s nothing wrong with a non-JP person to teach JP, as long as they actually know what they’re talking about.
But now there are trends of “translating English songs into Japanese” which there are several non-JP doing. I’ve seen like five accounts like this. A lot of them also preach about “DON’T do this in Japan!” and people will comment saying “I’m Japanese and do this all the time.”
There are some people who will just make their own “Japanese versions of the songs” but imply that it’s the song directly translated to Japanese when it’s not. The problem is that these people invite others to learn Japanese through them.
It’s really insulting to the language as a whole to use it to get views when 80 percent of the lyrics are either not close to the original song or have blatant grammatical errors and mis conjugations. I’ve seen Japanese people commenting on these videos too saying the Japanese is wrong, but since the majority of the audience is English, they just end up getting away with it. Someone put it aptly when they said that these people are “milking” the language.
There are a lot of ハーフ who “teach” the language, but grew up hearing Japanese here and there, so their Japanese is not perfect, which isn’t a problem if you’re not a LEARNING channel or claiming that things are translations when they’re not!
Sorry for the rant. I realize that they’re doing it to get views and followers and JP content is popular with the algorithm. But it really…really bothers me.
1 comment
I mean this is really nothing new at all. We have a long tradition of using tortured japanese to look cool. Even as far as inking it on people’s bodies. And japan has plenty of engrish on things too