The Invisible Hand

Thanks For Your Corporation

What is it with Japanese English anyway? I mean how can you come up with a phrase like "We run our shop with this year without a holiday . . . but we have an extra holiday" if you don't have complete mastery of the language? This stuff makes me suspect that the Japanese are actually making fun of us, not the other way around.

If you or I were to come up with some faux Japanese phrase I can guarantee it wouldn't even resemble anything recognizable as Japanese. Yet Engrish is almost always slightly less than total gibberish. How can that be? Either you know the barbarian's mother tongue or you don't.

Do the Japanese do the same job on French and German? Now that would be odd.