YugiNoob posted... So something similar: Japanese words like kamikaze, karaoke, Mount Fuji, etc. are mispronounced 99.99% of the time here in America. Even though everyone will understand if you pronounce karaoke as carry-oh-key, the fact of the matter is that that's incorrect. It's just a little mistake that people are familiar with, and therefore acceptable in normal conversation. Similar to how people will know what you mean if you say "for all intensive purposes", or "I could care less", even though it's grammatically incorrect.
I don't really care about the main subject of this topic, but this message made me raise an eyebrow so hard that I just had to respond. This is not true in any sense of the word, and I'm saying this as someone who speaks both English and Japanese as non-native languages.
If you stretch this logic far enough you could basically say that English speakers don't pronounce a single word correctly. Do you think every English speaker is pronouncing "government" wrong because it's a word borrowed from French? That is just absurd. And this happens with Japanese too considering Sino-Japanese vocabulary makes up about 60% of the words in modern Japanese dictionaries.
Imagine if you were to tell a Japanese person they're using the word (letter) wrong just because they borrowed the kanji from China and in Mandarin it means toilet paper. And again, this is just one out of... Tens of thousands of examples, across possibly every single language you can think of. Even the word (karaoke) is funny to think about, because the -oke literally comes from the word "orchestra", borrowed from English, and English borrowed it from Latin... And Latin from Greek.
I think those words you included in your posts stand out to you just because they look obviously foreign, but that's just because they're relatively recent loanwords. Just go through your own post and google the etymology of the "English" words you've been using and you'll see what I mean, and this applies to a
lot of languages.
Sorry for such a lengthy post, I kept thinking of examples and just kept adding crap lol.