But that foreigner doesn’t even speak English! (Video)

Either way, I think it’s better than the first commercial. Speaking of foreign languages in commercials have you guys seen the Pilot Boardmaster commercial?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI0-xB-oysg

That doesn’t make any sense at all!! My head hurts! It bothers me so much I almost want to call them and figure out what it’s trying to say….

Did he just combine French and Japanese? Either way, that commercial makes no sense. I love the window washing one – that’s hysterical.

more important than the possible racial stereotype implications in this ad, is that this lucky 16 year-old lady will be going home with a 30 year-old hakujin English sensei tonight!

Many people think that Japanese cannot accept the fact that foreigners can speak Japanese, but the majority of these people just don’t realize that their Japanese isn’t good enough to be easily understood by most Japanese. Japanese people downplay their ability, whereas Western Foreigners, at a certain point, play theirs up.
I used to be frustrated in the same way – “why do people assume I can’t speak Japanese??”

But then once I got better, that problem stopped happening. I haven’t had a situation like the one in the commercial for a couple years now, because when I speak Japanese, it is recognizable as such to Japanese people now.

In my mind the commercial is just speaking the truth. A lot of the time it doesn’t matter if a foreigner can ‘speak Japanese’, because the tone, pace, and word choice that they use does not sound natural.

So many foreigners like to play the race card here, but usually its young, white people who are for the first time feeling what its like to be a minority, and they overreact.