The other day at the Seven Park Ario Kashiwa supermarket, we bought some Australian beef for stew that looked good, along with a can of Heinz demi-glace sauce.
So the night before yesterday, we had beef stew for dinner.
It was my wife's first time to make beef stew, but she loves to cook and it turned out very tasty.
This time, she used Heinz canned goods, and my wife started talking about what happened when she opened the can.
As soon as she opened the can, she thought it was a cucumber(kyuri).
I didn't understand what she meant, so I asked her if it was "kyuri(Cucumber is called kyuri in Japanese.)", but she said it was "rice and kyuri(cucumber)", which I always like to eat.
It's true that I've been making and eating pickled cucumber at home lately, but I can't connect that with demi-glace sauce. In the first place, dark brown and green have nothing in common, even if they stand in opposite directions.
When I listened carefully, I realized that "kyuri" was not a cucumber but a curry.
It is true that beef curry and beef stew look very similar. I was finally convinced.
Curry is called karei in Japan and pronounced as curry in English, but in Filipino-accented English, it is kyurii.
The official languages of the Philippines are Filipino and American English. Many Filipinos use their English skills to work in English call centers and language schools.
I heard that if you want to get into this kind of profession, you have to learn pronunciation again in earnest. It's a problem when they have a Filipino accent.
English is now the lingua franca of the world, and at international conferences, representatives from various countries give speeches in English. Of course, since English is not their native language, each country has its own accent.
Japanese people's ability in English is ranked the lowest in the world, but when they have to use English, they try to imitate Americans as much as possible in terms of pronunciation and try their best not to have an accent.
Even so, it seems that Japanese people's English is difficult for Americans to understand.
The English that Filipinos usually speak, including my wife, has a Filipino accent that is sometimes difficult for me to understand unless I hear it over and over again or have it written down.
A good example is that curry sounds like kyuri(cucumber 9.
However, it seems that Americans and other people can hear and understand Filipino accented English much better than Japanese English.
Seriously? It's true.
Americans say that when they hear Filipino English, they can spell it in their head. So it's easy to understand.
Even though "curry" sounds like kyuri, the spelling "curry" naturally comes to mind.
On the other hand, Japanese people's English is not only accented but also unintelligible because they cannot recall the spelling.
I believe that I am not as good as my wife in reading and writing English, but I was proud to say that I was better than her in pronunciation.
But when I heard stories like the one above, I lost my confidence.
