Do anime characters speak Engrish on purpose?

roundbeats said:
I just realized the op is about pronunciation and not use. As was already mentioned, they necessarily mispronounce many words because they don't have the phonetics. Many words they pronounce however, aren't necessarily wrong and could just be considered their dialect of english, though a lot of the time, they really don't know the english, but are trying to use it anyway. In some limited cases I guess they could be mispronouncing words on purpose because it becomes standard (the aforementioned catch phrases).

Cejara said:


Yeah, but as I stated earlier. I don't have the phonectics for the use of the erre (rr) sound and the ~n sound in Spanish, but it took me a couple days of practice in Spanish class to learn. So this leads me to believe that they probably are mispronouncing words with the letter L in it on purpose (even though I know they don't use the letter L, but use R instead). I mean it would be the same concept of me trying to pronounce the spanish phonectics that I don't use at all in my daily life, but I am able to after like 1-2 hours of practice from a couple of highschool spanish classes. Be it, that they are professional voice actors you think they should be able to adapt to the letter L when necessary or at least practice it on their own time, since some shows do you english words. So I would hope that they are using "Engrish" just to be cutsey, otherwise its kind of pathetic that they are voice actors not practicing certain english phonetics for their professional career when a certain job requires them to speak an English phrase professionally (i.e. not Engrish). This is just my take on it though.

Haruka-SD said:
I asked a japanese person about the usage of Katakana, especially what happens when they write something like idk "Hyper Galaxy Spirit Force" or whatever animu catchphrase ever, for example as a title of a series or game on an advertisement. My good guess for the reading would be "Haipaa Garakushi Supiritto Faasu" and if it's written in Kana it can be quite confusing. "Faasu" wouln't be recognizable as an english word if written as ファース.

Again, I'd like to note that I am assuming the transcriptions for these words, based on 2 years Japanese lessons, three hours repeating basics and a faq (both with a japanese speaking person) and self taught animu language.

Now getting to the point, this person said, that as far as they know a lot of japanese people struggle with english and with reading english words in Katakana, as they are not always written how you pronounce it. (e.g. Galaxy/Garakushi would be more logical as "Gerekushi"). Another note: I am not a native speaker, so I can only go by the way I pronounce words.

What I think is that, if VA's get a script they simply don't bother looking up the actualy english words and they just learn the Katakana pronouncing. I can't blame them thb, because they probably have more important things to do than googling english words most japanese never heard of anyway. Many enlgish words are used in anime to sound fancier anyway, the other words are well know (e.g. aisukuriimu/aisu).

So Anime english sounds more wonky than a japanese person actually trying to learn the language, or speaking it.

I only skimmed through the thread and didn't noticed any reply along htese lines, if someone already stated this I am very sorry.

juzeddi said:
Are you talking about full sentences of loanwords? I doubt anyone purposefully mispronounces full sentences but loanwords are, of course, modified to fit the Japanese language. So, they say "erebeetaa" instead of "elevator" on purpose, for example.

KaraSurakka said:


Skip to 6:05
Japanese people know how to speak English but they still talk like that for some reason

Cejara said:


Shouldn't they be trying to do their best though as a professional voice actor? If I was one I would try to be as versatile as possible. Even if it meant practicing phonetics in a different language that is difficult to me. As for if it called to speak "engrish" on purpose then that would make sense I guess just to pronounce it as you said in the Katakana form. I think some VA are asked to do it in "engrish" or adapt it to a role they are playing like maybe trying to be moe or w/e. If the anime is trying to pronounce english words seriously though then (at least in my opinion I would if I was a professional VA) they should try to get english lessons to help with that or at least practice it on their own.