When browsing the Web, I often see such words as Pokemon, Pikachu, and Anime. This means Japanese animation has gained much popularity in international level. Hmmm...when I was a kid, I would often enjoyed watching Popeye, Tom & Jerry, and Space Family (Right? I forgot the title) on TV. I was very curious about what the canned spinach tasts like. Er, aside from that, the thing I want to talk about here is that a lot of Japanese words seem to have been getting into the English language.

What I find amusing is the word skosh. It's derived from the Japanese word sukoshi, which means "a little bit" as a noun and "a little" as an adverb. Skosh seems to be used mainly as a noun in English like "Just a skosh." In Japanese, along with the use of its literal meaning, sukoshi is a very convenient word to moderate the tone of your speech, I mean, to avoid sounding offensive. So if you say something like "I think his opinion is skosh strange.", in many cases, your real message will be his opinion is very strange.

Also what interests me is the pronunciation. How do you pronounce karaoke? Something like "Carry-Okie"? In Japanese, it's pronounced like "Car-Lah-OK". To be more precise, the vowels are pronounced short.

The same thing can be said about English-derived Japanese - vice versa. A vast number of English words are in the Japanese language. Once in Japanese, they are altered and pronounced in quite a Japanese way. Video is "Bee-Day-Oh", television is "Tele-Bee" (last-half omitted), yakitori is "Yuck-It-Orley" (Oh, it's Japanese)...

By the way, my first name is Kiyoharu. How do you pronounce it?