But that foreigner doesn’t even speak English! (Video)
January 18th, 2007 by James
In this Nova commercial currently airing on Japanese TV, the trapped foreigner from last year’s popular commercial speaks Japanese:
Unfortunately, the girl doesn’t seem to notice, and concludes that she must go to Nova so that she can figure out what the foreigner is saying. Are the makers of this commercial poking fun at the common complaint by foreigners that some Japanese people can’t seem to be able to mentally process the fact that foreigners they meet might actually be able to speak some Japanese?
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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
Thanks for the awesome video, Lost in Ube! I’ll post it right now.
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….
I bet that is the reason, though I can’t imagine the average Japanese person would understand what the commercial means. Unless the average Japanese person actually didn’t understand what the guy was saying and mistook it to be a foreign language.
Did he just combine French and Japanese? Either way, that commercial makes no sense. I love the window washing one – that’s hysterical.
Doesn’t NOVA also teach French?
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!
At the very end her friend is chasing after her and says “but that wasn’t English!” (あれ、英吾じゃなかったよ) so yes, it definitely is making fun of the idea that foreigners cannot speak Japanese.
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.