I was wondering if they pronounced English words how it's pronounced in English as opposed to the Japanese spelling or transliteration. Like how we pronounce "rendezvous" the French way and keep the spelling, even though, in English, that spelling makes no sense.
The Japanese language uses a very limited number of phonemes (possible consonants/vowels) and has special rules determining how things are pronounced that not all other languages do (e.g. most consonants have to be followed by vowels), so any foreign word or name has to be transcribed in kana using possible sounds in Japanese in order to be pronounced. There is no real attempt to be faithful to the original language's pronunciation, the only consideration is making the word possible for Japanese speakers to say.
Even if the words sound similar, if you said for example the word "training" with English pronunciation instead of the Japanese word トレーニング, that would be incorrect Japanese and there's a chance that you would not be understood.
I would argue that English doesn't actually try to pronounce loan words correct either. If you listen to how French people say rendezvous it's not the same, but we think of it as the same since the differences are viewed as being differences in accent not pronunciation (which technically is the same for Japanese loanwords but the Japanese accent is so much different that they come out totally different (although some Japanese loanwords are just straight up different)). Karaoke is a loanword from Japanese, and it's pronounced completely different from how they say it, even though the Japanese pronunciation makes more sense (why do we say an ee sound where it's an a??) English spelling is just so dumb already that we don't change the spelling to fit our pronunciation.
it's honestly not all that complicated. every language has it's own unconscious rules about how sounds go together, and since people usually only hear foreign words on ocasion, they're not all too familiar with the sounds in the words, and they, unconsciously, try to put these words together with what they're familiar with.
i've never lived in an english speaking contry before, but my native lang. has a lot of loanwords from english, all of which have patterns to the ways they convert foreign sounds to native sounds, so i'd definetely know that this happens. it's like how in indonesian we always say si instead of tion—in words like 'lokasi (location)' and 'prediksi (prediction)', or 'informasi (information)'—cause that sound just doesn't really exist; neither in native words, or our mouths. i guess what i'm trying to say is, different cultures just process sounds differently, though that's not to say these conversions are random. except for english though. english is pretty dumb and inconsistent tbh
Karaoke is a loanword from Japanese, and it's pronounced completely different from how they say it, even though the Japanese pronunciation makes more sense (why do we say an ee sound where it's an a??) English spelling is just so dumb already that we don't change the spelling to fit our pronunciation.
Good point with the karaoke! Like, we kept the spelling but decided to do away with the pronunciation
The renshuu dictionary has more than 800 katakana words that start with キャ. I’m sure there’s a reason that was used instead of カ, probably something to do with the way the English “a” sounds.
If you understand IPA, this Wikipedia page lists the common ways English words are adapted into Japanese: Transcription into Japanese. From the table, you can see how even the same sound in English can become different sounds in Japanese. It's influenced by many factors at the time of borrowing: the English dialect, the Japanese dialect, how both languages have changed over time, how the word was spelt, whether the word was transferred through speech or text or both, the surrounding sounds of a sound, etc. Not to mention the fact that loans also came from Dutch (コック, ペンキ), German (エネルギー, アレルギー), French (バカンス, プロフィール), Portuguese (ボタン, カルタ), etc. where it might sound English-like but is really not.
As for the カ vs キャ, this is because for many English speakers, /k/ and /g/ are fronted (pronounced further forward in the mouth) with /æ/, which Japanese speakers interpret as palatalization of the /k/ (represented by ゃょゅ). If you have this, you should notice the difference in pronunciation of the 〈c〉 in "cat" and "cot".
