With my proficiency in Japanese, I could make a living out of using the language. However, more often than not, I still can’t make head or tail of the loan words in Japanese at the first glance. While learning the language, I always found it difficult to master the loan words. As there is no shortage of new loan words in Japanese, I just keep stumbling over their meanings.

First, a little primer of the language: Japanese words can be transcribed using hiragana, katakana or kanji. Katakana is mainly used to transcribe new words borrowed from other languages, or gairaigo (loan words), much like “basi” for “bus” in Cantonese. Therefore, when I come across a loan word I don’t understand, I would often try to figure out the original English word through the pronunciation. If the loan word is not an English word, I will have to look it up in the dictionary (fortunately, over 80% of loan words in Japanese are English words).

In recent years, however, showing no sign of falling out of favour, loan words have even come to be overused in Japan. In addition to daily use, similar to Hong Kong people’s favourite mixed code in speech, i.e., sprinkling English expressions in an otherwise Cantonese conversation, loan words have made their way into media headlines transcribed with katakana. Titles of movies, books, TV drama series and songs, even advertising copy, are also loaded with loan words. Compared with Hong Kong, where over 90% of its population have at least a smattering of English, English speakers make up less than 10% of the Japanese population. Why are English words not so overused in Hong Kong as in Japan?

According to my Japanese friend, even Japanese people find it difficult to understand the mixed usage of the loan words because of their limited English proficiency. But why is such a verbal communication tool which is prone to misinterpretation still favoured by the mass media in Japan? The reason is simply that, transcribed with katakana, the loan words are much cooler, more eye-catching and pleasing to the ear for the Japanese. Hence understanding is of less importance.

Although a few years ago the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics called for less use of loan words to make it less disturbing to the local people, particularly the senior citizens, the trend seems all but irreversible.

* Translation from Chinese article.