Duplicate Trope: Asian Speekee Engrish

We don't need to derail into arguing about racism here. We are talking about a trope and whether it's sufficiently distinct from other tropes to be separate. Stay on that topic.

I agree that Asian Speekee Engrish is the supertrope to Japanese Ranguage. Since the latter is much larger than the former, merging them would bury the examples of the former, so I'd be against a merge.

I'd say there should be a supertrope to Asian Speekee Engrish (like what anime said on the last page), to include, say, Germans using V where W appears in English or applying the syllable stress rules of another language to English (or vice versa).

Then again, we need to clarify: do we want Asian Speekee Engrish to encompass R/L confusion (and other similar issues) as it does now, or to make it clearly about syntactic and morphological issues when speaking English?

EDIT: And a morphological issue would be leaving off something like the 's' in the third-person singular because your native language doesn't conjugate like that, like I just did.

edited 30th Mar '12 12:39:07 PM by Autumncomet

Asian Speekee Engrish is currently about a specific, stereotyped way of showing "Asian with poor English skills" in fiction. It's not necessarily about the way real Asians with poor English skills actually speak. Japanese Ranguage is a subtrope about stereotypical L/R confusion by Japanese speakers; any examples of that that are on Asian Speekee Engrish should probably be moved to Japanese Ranguage.

I agree we could use a supertrope about other "foreigners speaking clunky English" stereotypes.

There is nothing off topic about discussing whether or not something is tropeworthy and whether or not there are problems with a trope description (given that the trope in question pretty much says the trope is racist).

It is very much on topic, especially considering we have now gone on to discussing the possible creation of similar tropes. If we were to do something, I think that we need to establish why "Person with limited skills in a language speaks the language poorly" is trope and not simply a "Round things are round" sort of thing.

edited 30th Mar '12 1:44:31 PM by Catbert

"If we were to do something, I think that we need to establish why "Person with limited skills in a language speaks the language poorly" is trope and not simply a "Round things are round" sort of thing."

Because there are stereotypes of "speaks poorly" that don't necessarily match up with reality. I have several coworkers of Chinese, Japanese and Korean extraction who have shaky English, for the most part they don't make the stereotypical Asian Speekee Engrish errors but a completely different set of errors.

So then perhaps the trope description needs to elaborate on that distinction. Also, if this trope is only about specific sorts of errors and not any Asian person having bad English, then there needs to be some sort of demonstration of the specific errors that the trope is about.

EDIT PS: Aarrgh... the whole thing has been rewritten already so half of what I said above is now invalid.

edited 30th Mar '12 1:50:18 PM by Catbert

Catbert: This is your third and final warning. The topic of this thread is whether the trope Asian Speekee Engrish is a duplicate, a subtrope of a missing supertrope, or a super trope itself, or some combination of the three; and whether it should include strictly grammatical errors, or include phonetic errors.

It is not whether it's a racist trope or whether that has any bearing on its existence.

Further attempts to derail the discussion onto that topic will get you a forum ban for at least a week.

Am I making myself clear?

edited 30th Mar '12 2:45:04 PM by Madrugada

Clocking due to lack of activity.

The page in its current form is very good and addresses the concerns raised in the original post regarding readability. I think we can close this thread.

edited 30th Apr '12 8:42:09 AM by Catbert

Locking up.