Common Japanese misconceptions regarding foreigners

[miu]

8.Japan is not origin "Christmas" "Valentine"!
9.A CD, a video game are not invented on the telephone in Japan.

When I think about something like "every foreigner speaks English", I would assume it means that you're able to comunicate in English when you go to a foreign country... But this isn't even related to the topic too much

I had a Japanese friend who said that he used to think all foreigners speak Japanese with an American accent. When he saw a documentary about people studying Japanese in Europe, he was really surprised to find out their accent wasn't quite so American! Well, to be more accurate: he thought most foreigners speak Japanese with a thick American accent and was surprised when he noticed that foreigners are able to pronounce words the japanese way (e.g. for Finns pronouncing Japanese isn't quite as difficult as the Finnish pronunciation is much, much closer to japanese than English.) I was very surprised by what he said because I'd never assume something like that...

[Maciamo]

I had a Japanese friend who said that he used to think all foreigners speak Japanese with an American accent.

Yes, among Westerners it's mostly native-speakers of Germanic languages, and especially English, that have problems with the Japanese pronuciation. All Latin languages, Finnish, Greek, etc speakers have all the Japanese sounds in their language (except the "h" for Latins, but that they can replace by a soft "f").

[miu]

Yes, among Westerners it's mostly native-speakers of Germanic languages, and especially English, that have problems with the Japanese pronuciation. All Latin languages, Finnish, Greek, etc speakers have all the Japanese sounds in their language (except the "h" for Latins, but that they can replace by a soft "f").

I'm quite sure that the Japanese /u/ doesn't exist in Finnish as well as the /r/. I had to pay serious attention to the Japanese /r/ because it's so different - we roll our r's much more And the pronunciation of /u/ in Japanese is much closer to the Swedish /u/, so I don't think it exists in Finnish... But I could be wrong, though!

[Maciamo]

I'm quite sure that the Japanese /u/ doesn't exist in Finnish as well as the /r/. I had to pay serious attention to the Japanese /r/ because it's so different - we roll our r's much more And the pronunciation of /u/ in Japanese is much closer to the Swedish /u/, so I don't think it exists in Finnish... But I could be wrong, though!

True, but if you pronounce Japanese r's as l's, they will understand. Just roll you l's a bit and you'll sound like a Japanese. The Japanese 'u' is between the French 'u' and 'ou'. It's true that it's not exactly the same, but the Japanese themselves sometimes pronounce it more like one or the other, depending on the word.