Katakana English

Today I presented a brief training session on reading Japanese Katakana, using actual screenshots and logs from the Japanese version of our product. For certain cases, a significant percentage of the text in the product and logs can be understood just by using the table from this page (and a little bit of imagination). A few people did really well and when I asked them afterwards they said they had never tried to learn Japanese before. It was amazing.

 

For the pronunciation, I brought a japanese spelling toy (oshaberi machine). I'm not a native Japanese speaker and even though my accent is ok, I wanted to show accurate pronunciation, accent-free. My 2-year old daughter was protesting this morning when she saw me taking it :(

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 18, 2006
  I use Japanese Windows XP. The huge amount of katakana is often (linguistically) meaningless to Japanese. Often we associate a particular expression with the function without ever really understanding the meaning as an English reader would. Older people often have the most difficulty. I have worked as a translator so fully understand the issues being dealt with here and doubt that things can change much. However, it is frustrating.