History InMyLanguageThatSoundsLike / RealLifeJapanese

* Another name for the Kansai region of Japan where Kyoto and Osaka are located is the Kinki region, pronounced exactly like "kinky". [[WebAnimation/VOMSProject Pikamee Amano]] [[https://youtu.be/ofCbhtR_86M had some laughs at the coincidence.]] The formerly-Kinki University changed its English name to Kindai University in 2016 specifically to be taken more seriously as it sought to attract more international presence.

* Another name for the Kansai region of Japan where Kyoto and Osaka are located is the Kinki region, pronounced exactly like "kinky". The formerly-Kinki University changed its English name to Kindai University in 2016 specifically to be taken more seriously as it sought to attract more international presence.

* A Japanese to Hawaiian example: those who watch enough ''Franchise/LiloAndStitch'' would know that "ohana" means family. In Japanese, the o part of the word basically holds no distinction and the word "Hana" means "flower". This is aggrivated if one is listening to the opening theme of the 2007 ''Anime/SylvanianFamilies'' [=OVAs=], in which said word appears, when not knowing Japanese well or at all; one would assume the verse of the song is talking about the families when it is basically talking about flowers.

* There's a Mexican movie director named [[http://hari.tv/index.html Hari Sama]], whose name is pretty funny in Japanese, since it could be translated as "Lord Needle" (針様)

** Japanese also has the syllables "mi", "hi" and "yu", which sound like "me", "he" and "you". Unlike in Chinese, these [[note]]with the exception of "Yu", more commonly written as "Yuu"[[/note]] aren't names on their own, so WhosOnFirst is rarer than you might expect.

* "Kun" is both a [[UsefulNotes/JapaneseHonorifics Japanese honorific]] (pronounced "koon") and a Chinese name (pronounced "kwun"). The Japanese pronunciation happens to sound like a certain racist slur, causing at least one incident where an American tourist got the completely wrong impression...

** This is even more funnier for the name of a famous Japanese brand of monosodium glutamate named [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajinomoto Ajinomoto]], since it sounds like ''Alli No Moto''. (Broken Spanish for ''Don't Park Your Motorcycle There'')

* Israelis with the name Itai or Shiri (masculine and feminine first names, respectively) are often embarrassed to find out their names mean ‘painful’ and ‘butt’ respectively in Japanese.

** "Kurēmu" means claim (as in insurance claim), not cream.

* "Sharyō" (train carriage) is homophonic with the French word "chariot". Sadly "chariot" isn't the term used in French for "train carriage". It also doesn't mean quite the same thing as the English word -- it's a cart (as in horse and cart, or shopping cart), rather than the vessel people in antiquity would have ridden into battle.

* Then there's words which sound similar and have similar meanings, but are in fact etymologically unrelated.

* This commonly occurs between the Japanese and Spanish languages despite both having entirely separate linguistic roots, as they not only have similar-sounding words, but also share near-identical pronunciations for vowels and consonants. As a result, Japanese is shockingly easy to pronounce for Spanish speakers, and while Japanese speakers have a slightly more difficult time pronouncing Spanish due to sounds like the "j" or the strong "r", for them it's easier to pronounce than English. Here are some prominent examples:

* This commonly occurs between the Japanese and Spanish languages despite both having entirely separate linguistic roots, as they not only have similar-sounding words, but also share near-identical pronounciations for vowels and consonants. As a result, Japanese is shockingly easy to pronounce for Spanish speakers, and while Japanese speakers have a slightly more difficult time pronouncing Spanish due to sounds like the "j" or the strong "r", for them it's easier than to pronounce English. Here are some very visible examples:

** "Sō" means "so", as in "the case", and "sō desu" is a common interjection to express agreement or confirmation. It's easy for English-speaking students of Japanese to remember as it literally means "it is so".

** A "donjon" is a castle or fortified settlement, but suggests the unrelated European word "dungeon", meaning the cellars or prisons beneath a castle or keep.

** "Namae" means name (literally, "forename"). The word for name is similar to this in most Indo-European languages (including, of course, English), but this is coincidental.

** The Japanese word "manshon" comes from the English word "mansion", but means "apartment".

* A few Japanese words are English loanwords, but the words mean something different in English than they do in Japanese. For example, the Japanese word for "apartment" is "manshon", which comes from the English word "mansion".
* Japanese for "cook" is "kokku", which sounds like "cock" (it's actually the Japanese pronunciation of the English word).
* A English-borrowed case: in Japanese a confession (of any sort) is sometimes called a "kaminguauto" (coming-out).
* ''Emoji'', contrary to popular belief, is not a Japanization of ''emoticon'', but instead literally means "pictograph".

** "Shun" is a perfectly good name in both Chinese (pronounced something like "shwun") and Japanese (pronounced "shoon"). It looks exactly like the English word "shun" (to avoid).