Quote Originally Posted by dehro View Post
don't the japanese do that too, some sort of local rendition of english words?
nekutai (necktie)
ofisu (office)
hotto rain (hotline)
and so on..
Yes, which someone I once met on a birthday party called "the worst thing that ever happened to the Japanese language".
Japanese script really only works for Japanese words since it's not based on letters but on syllables and the language has a rather small pool of sounds. While I think all Japanese can read and write latin leters (Romaji) perfectly well today, at one point someone decided that a variant of the japanese script (Katakana) should be used for foreign words and the other variant (Hiragana) for Japanese ones. It works well when you simply import technology and scientific concepts from outside into your country, but turned out to have a terrible side effect when Japanese and particularly Americans actually start to interact with each other.
When you have a foreign word, you transcribe it to katakana in a way that is as close as you can get to the original word and after that nobody really cares what the original pronounciation was. Here in Europe, we have lots of languges very close to another with a long history of migrant groups all over the place, so we're used to the fact that other languages are pronounced differently and the correct pronounciation is indicated by different rules of spelling. Spoting a French or Spanish word isn't hard, because we know how some are pronounced and how they are spelled.
But until rather recently, the only thing you'd hear in Japan is dialaects of Japanese. And when you see a foreign word, it's written in Katakana. And as a Japanese, you know how katakana are pronounced as there is only one way to pronounce them. Now while english has a simple grammar, let me tell you that it has a really weird way of pronouncing sounds. You probably got that from the French, who do it as well.
When you learn a language that is full of sounds you never have tried to pronounced or may not even have heard pronounced before, your pronounciation will of course be terrible. And maybe it's because in Europe and America we're accustomed to strong accents of foreigners, but some Japanese people have told me that most Japanese are quite embarrased for their bad english and so they avoid speaking it at all. And when you have to deal with a foreign word, you don't try to figure out how it is pronounced, you transcribe it to Katakana and pretend it's pronounced like a a Japanese word. Which of course doesn't do anything to improve the situation.

To make things worse, since Japanese only has syllables, you often end up with a large number of unneccessary "u" and "o"s. In theory, they are not pronounced. But if you don't know the latin spelling of the word or someone told you how it is pronounced, you don't know that and it gets pronounced anyway.
Also there are some transcription rules that are "not very good" at best and "just wrong" at worst. Since there is a letter "n" that can stand by itself, also using it for "m" may be acceptable. But why "v" is transcribed as "b" even though Japanese has exactly the sound as "w" is beyond me. (The english "w" is weird.)
And last, Japanese words are usually quite short (though you can string a lot of them together), so if a word has more than three syllables, it usually gets cut down. In a way that is not really predictable.

When teaching Japanese, it's common to learn Japanese script as soon as possible and get away from transcribing to latin. To teach any language to Japanese, the very first thing should be banning any form of transcription.