Language and the Cheap Shot.

Something which so irritates me on YouTube are those videos which say: Can Japanese people pronounce these difficult English words? And then they show Japanese people trying their best and failing miserably. So what do we do then? Why, mock them of course, even if under our breath. (And maybe feel superior.)

Surely it must be obvious to everybody that different languages have sounds which don’t appear in other languages, and so the relative positions of tongue, teeth, and palate to which native speakers are habituated are different. It’s well known, for example, that the Japanese have difficulty with the letter ‘l’ and the hard ‘g’ because they haven’t been trained to use the sounds those letters make. And it works both ways.

So here’s a new rule for Google to apply: Any video which says Can Japanese people pronounce these difficult English words? must be accompanied by another one which says Can English people pronounce these difficult Japanese words? And then we can mock ourselves as well. (And maybe feel inferior.)