| Sakagami Tomoyo wrote: | | Yup. People who kind of understand how Japanese words get romanised are assuming that the title must of course be romanised Japanese and pronounce it accordingly, while failing to think about the fact that the title is actually a portmanteau of two English words, or listening to how it's pronounced in the show.
Anyone who has more than that token familiarity with the Japanese language - ie enough to be able to read katakana - can see that it's パトレイバー and therefore pat-lay-ber, not パトラボウル (or パトラボール) which would be pat-la-bore. In short, those hardcore fans aren't nearly as hardcore as they think they are. |
Yeah, one of these fans took up a Japanese class outside of regular school hours solely to try to watch anime without needing a translation and wound up flunking the class, though for reasons I was never too sure about (as he refused to elaborate further, and I wasn't going to press him). From what I heard, the teacher warned, at the beginning of the class, that anyone who wanted to take the class just to read manga or watch anime was going to have a tough time, as it taught real-life conversational Japanese rather than anime/manga Japanese. (He stopped consuming Japanese media after he dropped out.)
It's been a long time since I've seen any such fan accuse someone else of incorrect pronunciation when their own pronunciation is incorrect, at least offline, so I guess that's an improvement. Every now and then though, I find someone on YouTube who thinks the Naruto character named Pain is pronounced as "pine," despite his name being written as ペイン. (I can understand katakana, but I have very little knowledge of the Japanese language itself. I am a klutz at foreign languages, but I am pretty good at cryptanalysis, so I treated katakana as a code to break, as a personal challenge, and figured it out in that way.)
A related quirk I see on rare occasions is when people spell out, or say out loud, katakana that's clearly meant to be a non-Japanese word. For instance, the Pokémon Scyther's Japanese name is ストライク, or "Strike," but I'd sometimes see it spelled as "Sutoraiku" or spoken like that (and in a clearly English language kind of way, so they'll pronounce all the U's equally with the other vowels and say each syllable individually as "sue-toe-ra-eeh-koo"; the U's are also pronounced the English way, either as in "boot" or "food," or in a slurred surfer way as in "dude" or "lewd").
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