In Japan, my experience has been if you use a word wrong, Japanese people will give out a pained laugh. If you ask for advice on the right word to use, the conversation ends.
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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Have you met English? It's a fucked up amalgamation of meshed up loan words and spellings that don't sound like they are spelled. There are no rules only vibes. We have grammar police but I feel the same way about them that I do all cops. ACAB.
Are you talking about English or simplified English?
English is already a mess. The only people I've ever met who get persnickety about it with non-native speakers are assholes. I'd rather 'correct' them with a swift kick in the kisser.
Don't be embarrassed if your English isn't perfect. It's normal, and it's okay. We're all learning.
It may be just how normalised it is for English speakers to hear people speaking English imperfectly.
There's no shame or judgement in it. But when you find whimsy, oh boy.
I still say "delicious" in the way my Greek coworker did almost a decade ago, because it sounds better
And my dog trainer called my dog's arse his anoos one time and now that's all we call it. Talking about mine? Arse. The dog's? Anoos.
My wife worked with a guy from Korea and when he got upset at work he would say 'I go to mad!'
We randomly say that when we get upset. It's a more fun way of expressing your anger.
Please I want to know how to say delicious like a greek speaker
Dell-ee-siooze
But with a lot of energy
Also there are so many dialects with heavy variables that it's entirely possible to get a group of people all speaking english who can't understand each other. Throw someone with a thick Louisiana Cajun accent, a West Country dude, and Nevada hick into a room together and I don't think they'd understand each other. Maybe the hick could understand the West Countryman but that'd be about where it'd end.
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I love little expressions and turns of phrase. English is basically the remnants of other languages at this point.
It's the world's pidgin, and the world ain't over yet.
"Found in translation"
Beautifully said.
One nice thing about English, it will lexical borrow from you in an instant.
We just love new ways to say old boring stuff.
Sometimes it gets so ingrained into English that it feels natural.
好久不见 (hǎo jiǔ bu jiàn), lit. long time no see, it's originally a Chinese phrase that became commonplace in English. Even though it doesn't quite hold up grammatically in English, no one will question it.
Are you telling me nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen... linguistically?
I have been saying it for years, English is a very informal and open language, have fun with it. Sky water is not technically a wrong way to refer to rain, liquid laundry soup is absolutely a sauce for your laundry, dish bricks, day star, the list goes on
I think this is one of the reasons why English (or it's descendants) will forever be the international language of trade. If it's not your first language, it's damn difficult to make yourself sound like a native speaker, but it's damn easy to make yourself understood.
I think you're confusing a reasonably short period in recent history with "forever".
In History there were quite a lot of "international languages of trade" other than English. It seems to depend very much on which nations were the top empire of the age and because the last two top empires were English-speaking countries (first Britain, then after that the United States), the English language has been dominant as a second language for a over a century now, but before that the English language already existed in a form very similar to the modern form and yet it wasn't at all an "international language of trade" (in fact, at least in Europe, before English it was French that was the dominant language of trade).
I bet that the next "international language of trade" will be Chinese.
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but it’s damn easy to make yourself understood.
Words ordering with grammar can be unimportant to being known.
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Ironically, same with Japanese. They have an entire alphabet dedicated to foreign words, Katakana. You want a hamburger and a beer? That's a "ハンバーガーとビール" (Hanbāgā to Biru). Coffee from Starbucks on your way to work? That's a "ドライブスルーコーヒー" (Doraibusurūkohi - a drive-thru coffee). Better fried chicken than anyone has a right to can be found at the "コンビニ" (Konbini - aka the convenience store). Learning Japanese it's rife with these borrowed words. Half the time it's "you're fucking kidding." The other half the time it's learning some insane formalism that makes saying "thank you" take five minutes.
What's cool is how English then adds those loanwords or portmanteau back into its lexicon like karaoke or, as I'm seeing more recently, egg sando. I really love how languages do that.
Reminder English will happily mug other languages for words, if they are handing new ones out for free? It's gonna take that new word and run with it.
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In Japan, if you use a word wrong, people will almost certainly not tell you so as not to embarrass you unless your mistake is sufficiently more embarrassing or insulting.
Ya, I thought they told you that your Japanese sucked by saying "your japanese is really good." And it's only when they stop commenting on the quality of your Japanese that you know you are near native levels. Even then, if you don't look ethnically Japanese they still might keep saying it, so there's really no way of knowing.
What? Noooo, so this is how I find out!
I studied Japanese for about 11 years. I used to work in the west end, so I'd have Japanese tourists to practise on. They'd always be like, aaah, sugeeee! And tell me how good my Japanese was. I started speaking in Kansai ben just to throw them off and it always made them laugh. But tbh my Japanese was crap, I just thought I was doing a good enough job bluffing. As soon as they started talking in Japanese, I'd have to say kiku koto ikkomo dekehen waaaaaa 😅
I studied Japanese for like 6 months before I went and they were GUSHING at me spitting out me 15 phrases and trying to understand their words. if you're japanese and reading this now ILY so much and thank you for making that trip the best of my life.
This is a rather universal thing IME.
My grandmother liked to tell the story of when she visited in Japan in the 60s and greeted a bunch of people by saying "Idaho."
It is annoying that native speakers of languages other than English correct the way they do. But then again, anglophones have been listening to bad colonial English spoken in one global accent or another for almost 600 years now. Less true of other languages, with the exception perhaps of Latin, 2000 years ago.
Can confirm, this is basically how it goes in Texas. Almost a decade ago, my best friend and I were browsing this little hole in the wall shop in central TX run by an elderly Japanese couple. They got to chatting with us and at one point, said we were "forever friends". I've been using that phrase to describe us ever since.
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I was taking a summer afternoon nap with my girlfriend (now wife) and got up to look out the window for some reason about 8 years ago. She got up in a sleepy haze and said "Are you leave without say goodbye?"
We've been saying that to each other since.
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