Summary
Japan’s English proficiency ranking dropped to 92nd out of 116 countries, the lowest ever recorded.
The decline is attributed to stagnant English proficiency among young people, particularly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Netherlands ranked first, followed by European countries, while the Philippines and Malaysia ranked 22nd and 26th, respectively.
Having learned both english and now in the process of learning Japanese, katakana English is so confusing sometimes. It’s kind of correct when you don’t think about what’s actually written, but you sometimes have to think long to understand that an エアコン (eakon) is just an air con(dition).
It gets easier and I agree with saying it aloud. Once you start getting used to patterns, you can decipher them more easily (at least the ones from a language you speak). Remember no diphthongs and each syllable gets one beat.
My pet theory is that it’s also how the infamous “No Smorking” Engrish came about in reverse. The ‘o’ in smoking tends to sound long and a lot of times words that sound like that to the Japanese from English will be (long-sounding vowel)+r.
I always found saying katakana out loud made me understand.
Just wait til you run into it for languages other than English. Froofy bakeries love throwing French words in as well, so you might be left wondering about the flavor of a ガトーフランボワーズ
I lived in Japan for 3 years mate.
yah me too bud–not sure what you’re on aboutt
True. Also doesn’t help when you sometimes mix up シ(shi) and ツ (tsu) because the font (or someone else’s handwriting) makes them look very similar.
Alignment/starting position is the key. The "-like strokes in shi are left-aligned, the "-like ones in tsu are top-aligned. Same for ‘so’ and ‘n’. This is why people talk about stroke order being important (although in this case it’s not simply the order).
I don’t know Japanese at all, but the way my phone renders those characters I can’t tell anything about stroke order, and can only tell them apart because they’re next to each other…
I imagine there might be larger differences with Japanese specific fonts, but with whatever this one is the difference seems about the same as using italics with Latin characters…
I can see the difference, but I think it takes practice. シ lines coming from left, line align with bottom left and ツ lines coming from top and all 3 roughly align at top.
Edit: maybe ctrl+f ‘Happy Lilac’ on this page and it may help: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/katakana-chart/