L versus R strikes again in Japanese English

Unfortunately these keep showing up. One would think a spell-checker would pick up most of these but they are still there… The first one is from the supermarket. It used to be wrapped around an apple. The second one is from a restaurant’s menu by a lake near Mount Fuji. Spot the problem? I don’t know if it is overcompensation in this case but this is something that happens much more rarely – an L for an R… Of course this one would not be caught by a simple spell-checker but something a bit smarter which aims to find L <-> R substitutions could pick it up.

Ah the researcher in me is flaring up again :P

The mystery of “Shoecream” solved

When I first heard the term “shoecream” in Japan I was more than a little shocked. See, we were walking from lunch at a restaurant close to where I work and a Japanese friend asked me if I would like some “shoecream” as dessert. These turned out to be little cream filled puffs and I figured out that the word was simply a phonetic construction. It was not until about two years after that, or more precisely, last weekend, that I saw a box of “shoecreams” at the supermarket and realized what the original phrase is - “chou a la crème”. It’s a French phrase which, of course, means “creampuff”. It is very easy to assume that a foreign word in Japanese, rendered phonetically, comes from English as most actually do but in this particular case that assumption turned out to be worse than wrong. Still, it was pretty funny while it lasted ;)

Brushing up on my Japanese

While waiting for the visa stuff to sort themselves out I have been brushing up on my Japanese. I took Japanese for a year and a half at Carnegie Mellon but that was more than two years ago so I do not remember nearly as much stuff as I would like. I have been looking at my copy of Let's Learn Japanese. It's a pretty old series - I think it's from the 80s based on the little skits where they show this clueless Canadian guy, Yan, coming to work in Japan. I think it's pretty useful for anyone who may not have had any instruction in Japanese as well. You can even find videos of the complete episodes by simply searching online - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=let%27s+learn+japanese+yan.