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The Joys of "Engrish"
I came across this review of the book The Joys of Engrish, by Steve Caires. The book, like Caires' website, engrish.com, contains examples of (mostly Japanese) English bloopers. In Asian countries--especially Japan--English has become a fashion statement of sorts; and the language is often used ineptly or out of context. In Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One, I mention a T-shirt I saw while in Japan that contained the expression, "Rock my Dogs."
I have mixed feelings about the idea of a book which openly pokes fun at the poor English one sees and hears in Japan. One of the chapters of Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One is entitled "But They Insist on Speaking English with Me." This chapter, which talks mostly about Asia, relates the discouragement that many students of Asian languages feel when they go to the trouble of becoming highly proficient in an Asian language, only to discover that those around them insist on conversing in broken English. The Japanese in particular tend to be a bit over-confident of their English skills, and often assume that foreigners simply can't (or shouldn't) learn Japanese. Westerners who speak Mandarin report similar reactions in China.
The reasons for these attitudes--which are by no means universal but nonetheless common in Asia--are many. I note a number of reasons in my book: the uneven linguistic relationships left by European colonialism in Asia, the Japanese inferiority complex vís-a-vís America, and several others.
Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One also has a chapter that demonstrates how the perception that "everyone in the world speaks English" is misguided. The truth is that many people in the world know some English. (This distinction is explored in-depth in my book.)
By all appearances, The Joys of Engrish is intended to be nothing more than humor, and I am not in favor of ascribing any other motives to the book. Nonetheless, I fear that in laughing over the humorous language bloopers documented in The Joys of Engrish, many native English-speakers will overlook an important fact: There are no books which poke fun at our poor skills in Chinese, Japanese, etc.--because damned few of us can even manage a word or two in these languages at all. This self-defeating fact is, perhaps, more deserving of ridicule than all the mistakes that Asians make when trying to speak our language.