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Xenophobia in the modern age

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1 Report	at 31 May 2006: 13:31 Why is it that most Japanese artists, Karabiner included do not desire to talk to English speaking people. I'm not speaking of the idiots that post spam of asking them to draw their character, but well intentioned people who simply desire to ask a few questions? Is this a result of the xenophobia that existed pre WW1 and WW2, or is this a result of later events. I also realize that other countries have xenophobia to degrees but I'm not asking about them. All in all it seems silly to act like this when most countries these days are connected to the information superhighway, which in a way makes us all the part of one vast nation. Discuss!
2 Report	Cyber620#wQh3/XNrY2 at 31 May 2006: 13:48 Maybe because most of them don't speak english. From what I understand american culture is all the rage over there .
3 Report	Andemon at 31 May 2006: 13:58 http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Japanese Seriously, though, it's basically just as difficult for average Japanese to learn English as it is for the rest of us to learn Japanese - ie. pretty damn difficult. Most Japanese (including the artists, of course) have major problems with English alphabet, grammar and such.
4 Report	at 31 May 2006: 14:14 What I've heard from the artists is that "We don't want to talk to Americans, nor do we want to learn English." Gee, nice people huh?
5 Report	Edward Lapine at 31 May 2006: 14:24 English is overly complicated than it needs to be. There is so many little stupid rules with spelling, speaking the words, grammar, etc. Japanese is MUCH more simple (so are a lot of languages). Hell, I bet any person who knows japanese can teach you about 85% of japanese grammar in about an hour. Just remembering the vocabulary and the writing is the most difficult of learning it.
6 Report	Foxstar#3GqYIJ3Obs at 31 May 2006: 15:12 I wouldn't label it "Xenophobia" or "Hate those gaijin" so quickly, but in most cases it would be just a wish not to end up buried under piles and piles of english writen fanboy spam. Karabiner from my understanding is a tad sore on fans anyway due to endless harassment, even good meaning, but harssment anyway for more adult art, stemming largely from his digimon stuff. It's also not limited to Japanese. Orochi has been noted slamming on english speakers more then one time, but that's some whole other kettle of fish.
7 Report	at 31 May 2006: 15:18 Ok, first this I'm not wapanese and this is coming from pure observations. Most Japanese people are very hesitant to learn English. This is because, after speaking Japanese their entire life, they lack the ability to communicate certain sounds essential to the Saxon languages(most notably the lower case l sound, there's no such sound in Japanese), this makes them sound rather odd when speaking English. It's not that they dislike americans/italians/wheover else(although some do, just like some americans/italians/whoever dislike them), but the English they do speak, they only learned what was taught to them in school, which is very rudementary and is pretty much Engrish due to the lack of fluent speakers of both japanese and english to teach English. Many learn phrases like "I don't talk to English" or "I don't want to talk to you", which may sound rude to a native speaker, but to them it's just saying they don't know how to talk to you, because they don't know fluent English. This is actually quite common in all cultures. Albeit American and European cultures have many native English speakers and those that don't speak it natively tend to learn it. It's kind of like a Japanese person coming up to you, talking in Japanese, and wondering why you don't respond with anything other than "Wakaranai desu" or something that you might of learned to tell them you can't talk to them because you don't understand. If they could, I'm sure most would, but a vast, vast majority don't even speak English at all, and the small amount of English you find by them is either machine translated or translated by a friend. If you're American and speak Japanese, they'll talk to you, they don't care what race you are.
8 Report	at 31 May 2006: 17:22 >>4 I think you may have something. There is a predjudice right now very rampant worldwide, especially in Asia and it's not predjudice against english or the west, but specifically Americans. Sorry to sound like a jerk, but that's the facts and wheather it's related to the original posters situation, I dunno.
9 Report(capped)	Xenofur at 31 May 2006: 17:50 Everyone fears me, they even got a word for it. ;_;
10 Report	Min at 31 May 2006: 19:44 Amusing anecdote: I took three years of Japanese in college, and made several friends in my classes. One of them went to Japan on a student exchange program. Once while he was there, he accidentally walked into a shop that had a "No English" sign next to the door. Upon seeing that he was American, the shopkeeper yelled at him in very broken English that he wasn't welcome. My friend responded by apologizing in Japanese, and the shopkeeper, after realizing that my friend could speak Japanese, apologized and said that he's constantly frustrated by tourists who only speak English but ignore the sign on the door and come in and try to do business anyway. I think that's probably the same case, here; I'm sure there are a lot of Japanese artists who wouldn't mind talking to English-speaking fans, it's just that their English skills are very poor (or nonexistant) and they get very frustrated by the huge number of fans who try to communicate with them in English. Seriously, think about how many people you know on any given board or forum that are complete morons; now, imagine that these people are all trying to talk to you and they can't speak your language. It's easy to understand how this could drive somebody to the brink of madness. Sure, it's easy to look at them and say, "Oh, just learn English!" Why don't they? Because it's hard. Why don't you learn Japanese? Because it takes years of serious study to be able to carry out a simple conversation, let alone a detailed discussion. And, as somebody who speaks English natively and has a mild understanding of Japanese, it is my objective opinion that it's much harder for a native Japanese-speaker to learn English than it is the other way around. English is hard. Really hard. Also, for what it's worth, Karabiner's a really nice guy. I've seen him talk to people in English on occasion, but it's rather hard for him, so he doesn't do it often. Not to mention that people endlessly harass and beg him for free art.
11 Report	SuperSeoul at 31 May 2006: 22:19 Look at it this way: american action stories portray most japanese people as either a clueless tourist, or is an evil superl33t bad guy with 32849384798 katanas of doom, whilst a lot of japanese manga and anime portray A WHOLE SHITBUCKET of westerners, especially americans, as antagonists.
12 Report(capped) (sage)	Raven at 31 May 2006: 22:50 >>10 I think you have it right on the money. See, it's kind of like Fchan rules. If we bend a rule for one person, we end up expected to do so for everyone. So we have to try our best to be consistent. With artists like Karabiner and Dr. Comet, it's not too different. If they try to talk with one fan, then other fans will be begin to expect the same treatment. It's just not worth the stress and frustration.
13 Report	at 1 Jun 2006: 02:56 On various travel shows they have shown in Japan various signs, "No English" was one of them. However, a greater number of signs were simply written "No foreigners." If that's not a plain enough sign on an establishment I don't know what is.
14 Report	SuperSeoul at 1 Jun 2006: 04:22 >>13 That doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge the assinine idea of "white supremacy" on our side.
15 Report	GrapeTang#90uMe5dJAk at 1 Jun 2006: 05:55 >>14 Yeah, but it doesn't even have to be full blown racism. How often do you see people who don't really hate other cultures and races, but they think REALLY highly of their own. Maybe they don't hate american fans so much as they like japanese fans, and they only have so much time to deal with them all...
16 Report	at 1 Jun 2006: 08:35 >>10 Truth. English is one of the hardest languages to learn. On the opposite spectrum, Korean is apparently one of the easiest.
17 Report	at 1 Jun 2006: 09:30 >>14 Then there's the idea of Sexism, and Japan is one of the world's worst places on earth in terms of how sexist they are.
18 Report	at 1 Jun 2006: 14:13 >>14 Weo do, how many shopkeepers do you know that can do business in any other language than English? It's the same thing here, it's not racism, or race supremacy, they just have no itnerest in you if you can't do business with them.
19 Report	Min at 1 Jun 2006: 17:58 >>16 I'd believe that. For what it's worth, I have a few coworkers who've been teaching themselves Korean out of a college textbook, and on a recent business trip to South Korea, their hosts commented that they were impressed with how well they could speak it. (granted, it's possible they were just being polite)
20 Report	Sage Gaudia at 1 Jun 2006: 19:32 Korean is VERY easy to learn, when I was 14 I learned it simply by hanging out with a Korean friend and visiting various websites that aid in learning it, I'd recommend it if someone was looking for an easy Asian language :) And like others said, English is by far one of the hardest languages to learn, not because we use the roman alphabet, but because we have so many useless rules and such that its just too tedious for any person that uses another symbol language or such to learn, infact German would be easier for them >_> it was for me.
21 Report (sage)	Juberu at 1 Jun 2006: 22:12 I thought English was hard to learn because of idoms.
22 Report	at 1 Jun 2006: 23:13 >>21 English is hard to learn because we have a ton of wacky ass grammar rules. I have more foreign internet friends than friends in the US, and although I never say anything about it, they make a lot of little grammar mistakes that sound perfectly logical, but to someone who has it as a first language, is obviously wrong. This really doesn't happen in other languages to the same extent that it does in English. If you know the language, usually you it's fine. It's so funked up because we're a mix of every language on earth, and we inherit grammar rules from every language on earth so they're not the same for each instance of a word.
23 Report	Bizzle at 1 Jun 2006: 23:43 English is difficult to learn because it had no concrete rules. Old English, which was little more than a German dialect, was affected first by the Latin and Gaelic-speaking peoples of what is now the British Isles and then by the Norse and Frankish Norman invaders who arrived there with William the Conqueror. As the British Empire grew in subsequent centuries, the language aquired words and phrases from the lands they occupied and traded with. Occupied peoples and mostly native-English colonies, far from England itself, developed their own dialects which were greatly influenced by the various other languages that surrounded them. As it stands today, the language as it is spoken in most corners of the world bears very little resemblance to the Saxon dialect that it began as. The absorbtion of the various elements of those other languages has worn away the rules which the parent language followed. Learning a language without reliable rules and with an uncounted myriad of words taken from around the world would be a daunting task for any non-native speaker.
24 Report	at 2 Jun 2006: 00:32 >>23 I'm not an English major or anything, so I might be wrong. I believe that there are concrete rules with regards to syntax (in modern English, anyway; I can't profess to know much about Old English). I've been forced to diagram enough sentences to at least know something about that. It's with pronounciations and morphology that the English language seems to have several inconsistencies. Spanish is an easy language. I love Spanish.
25 Report	at 2 Jun 2006: 00:42 >>24 Phonics, I should say, for pronounciation. Such silly heuristics we need to keep track of it all! (I before e except after c...) That's one reason I find Spanish so easy in comparison; you just say the words as they're spelled.
26 Report	at 2 Jun 2006: 12:31 >>11 westerners and americans in particular are seen as very antagonistic, demanding, hasty and rude in japan, as in some other countries. most things in life in japan are seldom as straightforward as they are in western life; though that is changing into the 21st century. they simply do not do confrontation unless they know you personally, especially in business or in trade. so i find it doubtful anyone was dismissed out of hand, but if they didn't know english well and the other person didn't know japanese well if at all, frustrations are bound to flare. and if you look at it from their perspective, or any random artist's or writer's perspective, english fluency aside, how would you feel if someone you didn't know came up to you and started asking you for porn, or wanting to discuss very intimate things that you don't usually discuss in polite company, much less public. or started stalking you via IM or e-mail for the same and using words you might not know. i think the average person would find a way to excuse themselves ASAFP, even citing a language barrier as why they can't talk to you further. seems like it'd be a pretty fast way to obfuscate enough to make good their escape but not seem too standoffish about it. but that's just my opinion, i've been wrong before.
27 Report	at 2 Jun 2006: 13:25 >>25 But when you learn it from when you're born, it's not really conscious to keep track of the pronounciation rules, it's mainly ingrained into you to where it's automatic. However, anyone who's ever learned a language can profess this is nearly impossible to do with a learned language.
28 Report(capped) (sage)	Raven at 2 Jun 2006: 18:44 >>27 Not true. I've been told that my pronunciation of foreign languages is near flawless. My old Spanish teacher was from Spain, and I managed to fool her into thinking I already knew the language and was merely in the class to get an easy A. I'm also able to learn dialects in a matter of days, sometimes hours or minutes. Some people can do it naturally, some can't. But it's not impossible.
29 Report	at 2 Jun 2006: 20:31 >>27 My Japanese teacher stated I was his only American student who didn't have an American accent. It's not impossible.
30 Report	SuperSeoul at 2 Jun 2006: 22:44 >>27 The only language i can't make myself speak is Masai.
31 Report	Bizzle at 2 Jun 2006: 22:53 I've known few native English-speakers who were able to conform to proper grammer and pronunciation, even consciously. Most people lace their speach with colloquialisms, sentence fragments, and a regional patois. Of course, this is true of all languages, but it is particularly prevalent amongst English speakers.
32 Report(capped) (sage)	Raven at 3 Jun 2006: 10:52 >>31 Is about all reading. Reading is to makes our speaking English good. :D
33 Report	at 3 Jun 2006: 11:22 Is about all reading. The important points here are effort, immersion and culture. In itself english is a very easy language for anyone who natively speaks a latin-based or -similar language. The key to learning it tho is to use it, on all levels. Someone who reads and writes a lot will have a VERY easy time of learning the written english and will thus be quite familiar with all it's rules and whatnots without consciously thinking about it. Someone who doesn't will suck at that, period. That does not stop that person from speaking it perfectly fine tho. On the other hand one who has learned the written english very well and even knows all the ins and outs of pronounciation might utterly suck at actually speaking it. Now, why is english actually easy to learn? It is a very ordered and simple language. It might have a good amount of intricacies, but overall it is really simple compared to other languages. (An example would be german, which assigns every thing a gender and thus has an increased amount of articles and pronouns, like for example "der die das des dem den" which all mean "the", only in different genders and relations, and can be used multiple times, resulting in 16 different combinations.) In short: Anyone who claims that english in itself is a "difficult" language is only fooling themselves and in most probability just too lazy to actually learn the languages and gets stuck on the rules. Something where it is correct to claim that tho is when one claims that for eastern cultures english is a very difficult languages. The reason for this is tho, that their culture and language is built entirely different thus their thought patterns are different as well. Example: hon = book, yume = dream, no = of english: book of dreams japanese: yume no hon I think this demonstrates quite easily how the japanese simply THINK differently and thus have a very hard time grasping the english language. (Aside from the letters = single noise(EN) and letters = syllables (JP) thing.)
34 Report	Bizzle at 3 Jun 2006: 14:04 >>32 What you say! Indeed, seeing the system plainly illustrated is a great help to anyone. >>33Of course immersion helps. Our brains have evolved an inate ability to copy and learn speach patterns that we hear used by others. Even a toddler can wield an elementary knowledge of English after only a few years. The fact that a non-native speaker can learn the language fairly quickly by immersion is not evidence that English itself is particularly easy to learn. English is a Latin-based language, but, even today, the vocabulary is largely Germanic in origin. A person who speaks a latin-based language and becomes immersed in an English-speaking community will thus learn the system fairly quickly but will take a while longer to learn more than a simple vocabulary. I would postulate that it would be easier for people who speak a Germanic language to become fluent in English, although they may not be able to learn a passing knowledge quite as quickly as someone who speaks a Latin-based language. I agree that people who speak an East Asian language have a particularly difficult time learning English. I imagine people who speak Slavic dialects have similar difficulties learning English. When I attempted to learn the Russian language, I remember having a particularly difficult time with it. In a way, Engllish is similar to Slavic languages in that no two regions speak it in quite the same way. As a Seattleite who has lived in Northern Florida and who has a Bostonian wife, I can attest to that. Wow. I hope that didn't sound too much like a boring 11th grade English lecture.
35 Report(capped) (sage)	Raven at 4 Jun 2006: 01:58 I petition for removal of serious internet from silly internet. Silly internet wishes to secede from the union. :/
36 Report	at 27 Jun 2006: 10:59 In my experience, it is extremely easy to learn to make unusual sounds. I can pick up new dialects in not years, not months, not days, but minutes. (The only one that ever got me was the rolled 'r' in Spanish. I get it right when speaking Spanish but can't do it for the life of me otherwise.) It isn't hard to learn new words either. I gained a basic but workable vocabulary in French after only days of studying. The hard part is grammar. After weeks of studying French I could hold conversations in it, but only if the poor person I was talking to was willing to bear the French equivalent of Engrish. It wasn't that my words were wrong but my grammar was butchered. I'm going to go out on a limb and say any difficulty in learning english, or vice versa to another language, is usually about grammar. I have at various times picked up basic knowledges of Japanese, French, German, Spanish, and Latin. The one thing I could never master was the grammar rules. German and Spanish both assign genders to everything and that's nonsensical to me. Umbrellas don't have genders. D:
37 Report	at 27 Jun 2006: 11:02 In soviet russia, umbrella holds you!
38 Report	at 27 Jun 2006: 11:15 >>37 Aww! That's sweet. Wait, is it a guy umbrella or a girl umbrella? 'cause like, I mean, I'm straight. XD
39 Report	Fieron at 18 Sep 2006: 00:40 im just going to be blunt here, not very many people like Americans, hell some americans hate americans COUGHMICHAELMOORECOUGH
40 Report	at 18 Sep 2006: 02:56 whatchoo people smokin? of course some japanese hate people, every nation has its share of idiots and xenophobia. Some japanese establishments don't let white people in because they don't like how SOME white tourists act. Now before anyone gives japanese racism excuses like "well its a different cultre" or some BS, I know they don't know how to completely deal with it, no store/club would be able to get away with that here, idiocy is idiocy. Japanese bathouses banned non-japanese for a time because tourists didn't follow the rules of the establishment. Though this was challanged in court by an American born Japanese girl who was denied access. So Japanese finally have anti-discrimination laws on the books Also the japanese hate Chinese, in fact its very hard for chinese to find a home in some areas of Japan because relators/landlords think they use too much cooking oil and will stink up the place. Likewise Chinese HAAAAAAATE Japanese because of war atrocities, and Koreans and Japanese HAAAAAATE each other. Also for some reason South Koreans don't like Indians... a manager at a store I worked for explained he was trying to piss off his parents by dating an indian girl rubs head >>39 blahblahblahblah
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