Foreigner makes Japanese mistakes in tea commercial
Reader Miss Igirisu wrote us to make a comment about a commercial for Coca-Cola’s Ayataka tea:
Just saw an advert on Japanese tv for bottled tea- a blonde girl and a Japanese man, the girl says something in Japanese (I think it was ‘ashi’) and he corrects her (‘aji’) and she keeps making mistakes.
Could this be a female Mr James?
In the commercials, which have been airing for months not, accomplished actor Hiroyuki Sanada corrects the woman’s Japanese and then laughs at her cuteness when she makes the mistake again.
I don’t doubt that there are plenty of foreigners out there who speak poor Japanese, but this woman is attempting some pretty advanced sentences. It’s ridiculous to think that the one word she’d screw up would be aji(flavor), a simple word that foreigners tend to learn early in their Japanese studies. Her deafness to the difference between aji and ashi is also perplexing.
Here’s the other commercial in the series, in which she makes the more plausible error of mispronouncing nigori (impurity):
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