[sumo] Name Spelling/Pronunciation

[Alisdair Davey]

> 
> On Sun, 2007-11-18 at 17:57 +0900, Jack Gartin wrote:
> 
> > Japanese have a poor to very poor tolerance for variation in
> > pronunciation of their language.  If you don't say it correctly,
> > comprehension in most Native speakers of Japanese drops to near zero.
> > I get a lot of "eh?" from Japanese I talk to, so I know well what I
> > say here. 
> 
> 	That is an interesting observation.  Japanese is not a tonal language
> (just like all western languages) yet they appear to have less
> comprehension than people with tonal languages, such as Thai, Mandarin
> and most of the South East Asia languages.  You would think that they'd
> be a little more forgiving of mistakes made by non-Japanese speakers.
> There's probably lots of cultural and social stuff that could be said
> about this but I'm to tired to even try.

As a solar physicist who has spent some time in Japan and a lot more time
interacting with Japanese solar physicist on solar satellites such as Yohkoh
and Hinode, I have to say that most of my Japanese colleagues have always
been exceptionally tolerant (and demonstrated surprising understanding!) of
myself and other American and multinational colleagues who tried to speak
Japanese with degrees of fluency that vary from the most basic to totally
fluent. I wouldn't presume to argue with the general point but did want to
point out one area where the opposite has been true. 
Thanks
A.

-- 
Alisdair Davey                                 ard at pergamentum.com