My neck hurts. It's stiff from all the laughter in the past hour.
Aya and I were poking fun of Japanese English for about two hours now. Now for those who don't know, Aya is my language study mate on Skype; I help her in English and she helps me with my Japanese. One of the discussions was regarding the word bread in Japanese, which is pan. Pan happens to be a borrowed word from Portuguese and Spanish, so the word for bread is--well--pan.
Unfortunately, some Japanese speakers think pan is an English word since it's written in katakana (one of the alphabet systems used to write foreign borrowed words), and when they want to purchase or buy bread in the United States, they end up requesting, "Pan, please." To their surprise, they find a frying pan sitting in front of them on their dining table, and can offer nothing back but a puzzled look.
"Kuenai!" Aya jokingly adds. (I can't eat this!)
Oh, boy. I would love to see this personally.
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