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Why are Japanese so bad at English (at least in anime)?

freakpanda
Wasn't sure whether to post it here or on Japan discussion, but here we are. So, in A LOT of anime, the characters usually struggle immensely to even get one full sentence in English out from their mouth and if someone speaks good English, s/he is seen as some sort of genius. Why is that?
kurosora97
I think because they have/are used to a character set instead of an alphabet which can be difficult to split particles in different letters. Squirrel for example would be very difficult to say for a Japanese person because their character set only alows them to say something like SU-KU-U-RU-U. We have only 26 Letters in our alphabet while the Hiragana chart has 46 characters(ka, ki, ke, ko, ...). http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Table_hiragana.jpg We have a smaller "alphabet" but we can make much more different combinations like (cry, truck, whisper, ...) which are all impossible to make whith the Japanese character set. Just pretent we need to spit the sound of 1 letter and make 2 new letters of that one which can be combined to make the original letter while the 2 letterpart still can be used independently. Also we have a few letters that are like one and the same sound in Japanese like R-L and F-H and we even have letter which sound doesn't appear in the japanese language like X, Q, V. I'm not english native and it took me a while to speak, write english fluently. But I did not had to start from the ground up, al least the alphabet was the still same which is not the case if you are a native Japanese going to learn English. -Does this answer you question a bit?-
illuminatus571
Going with what Kurosora97, it all boils down to the Japanese language. The Japanese language is phonetically and structurally different from Proto-Germanic which English stems from. There are some sounds in the English language that just don't exist in Japanese (most commonly seen with L, but this is not the only example) To truly understand the differences, I would encourage you to learn Japanese, at least at a basic level. And also, remember, a lot of Anime that has scenes with English expressions and phrases, the complexity is played up for comedic effect.
freakpanda
@kurosora97 That answers more than enough! Thanks for the answer! (also thanks to @illuminatus571 for extra info)
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